Advanced Metrics for Hotel PPC Campaigns

(This is part 3 of this series. Also see Advanced Blogging Metrics and Advanced Metrics for Social Media.)

As I showed yesterday, ad clickthrough (CTR) and cost per click (CPC) aren’t sufficient for measuring the performance of your hotel’s PPC campaign. By all means, track these statistics as well as revenue-related numbers such as:

number of conversions (reservations, email inquiries from website, etc)
cost per conversion
conversion rate/percentage

Photo by aussiegall

But any search marketing manager worth her pay is already tracking those numbers. Here’s how you can push further and receive more insight from your hotel’s PPC campaign.

Advanced metric #1: Keyword quality score. Google assigns each keyword in your AdWords campaign a quality score of 1-10. The higher your score, the lower you pay for each click and the higher your ad may appear in search results. (Yahoo and MSN have similar systems) Dave Davis has a good post on how to improve your quality score.

Advanced metric #2: Coverage. I first learned about coverage from Richard Stokes, author of Mastering Search Advertising (an excellent book), and founder of Adgooroo. Basically, coverage is the percentage of times your ads appear when someone searches for your target keywords. If your coverage rate is low, you are missing out on potential clicks. I’ve personally seen campaigns that were missing 90-95% of impressions, which is a huge loss from a branding standpoint.

Advanced metric #3: Position vs. CTR. Another piece of good advice from Richard, you can often achieve comparable CTR at a lower cost by intentionally lowering your position from the very top. Doing this gets you around bidders with big budgets and increases your coverage.

Advanced metric #4: Position vs. Conversion. Many beginning search marketers think that conversion rates improve with their ad’s position. This isn’t usually true. The top position usually receives more clicks, but conversions usually remain the same through positions 2-5. Plus, with a lower ad position, your cost per click is much lower. Do you own testing to see if this is true in your situation.

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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }

Dave Davis February 18, 2009 at 12:47 am: Great article (and series) Josiah. I think you hit the nail on the head with metric #3 there. It is by FAR the most important metric in any AdWords campaign.

Thanks for the mention too.
Josiah Mackenzie February 18, 2009 at 12:52 am: Thanks for stopping by, Dave. You found this pretty quickly – must have a good tracking system in place!
Dave Davis February 18, 2009 at 3:29 am: Not at all, just the old XMLRPC

Just subscribed too.