New Study On Paid Search In Hotel/Travel Industry Shows Discrepancy In Spending

Pay-per-click, or PPC consultants can help businesses obtain more inbound inquiries, generate more sales, and make them more popular and prevalent overall. In today's increasingly internet-driven world, having a strong presence on the web is crucial to success, and PPC advertising can help do just that.

A new study by BrandVerity, the trademark protection and paid search monitoring service, has found that when it comes to online travel agencies (OTA) and individual hotels, the amount of money they spend ranges pretty drastically. The study was reported by the online resource for hospitality news, HospitalityNet.org.

Sites like Expedia, Booking.com, Kayak, and Hotels.com, which are all OTAs, spend about $67,250 per day on average for PPC on Google Adwords alone. "The findings show just how much the online travel agencies are outspending hotels, using their breadth of inventory and depth of pockets to deliver more in-bound paid clicks," wrote Ahmed Mahmoud, contributor to HospitalityNet and founder of Revenueyourhotel.com who has more than 18 years of international hospitality industry experience. "In short, this study says that OTAs are indeed bidding against hotels in ad auctions – and are paying handsomely to rank concurrently or higher than hotel brands."

More and more smart businesses are listening to PPC consultants and following a similar strategy because so many people use the internet every day, and at the end of the day it gets results. Approximately 93% of online experiences begin with a search engine. They're also cost efficient, as inbound leads cost about 61% less than outbound leads. Overall, search ads accounted for $9.1 billion (39%) of the total internet advertising revenue for the first half of 2014. If you include mobile-related search revenue, search ads totaled $11.8 billion, according to an Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) report.

On top of the leads OTAs generate thanks in part to their PPC managers, many consumers go to these sites because of the ease and convenience of a 'one-stop shop.' Instead of having to search multiple hotel sites individually, they can quickly compare and contrast different deals.