Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is a favoured marketing strategy for many hotels. It allows you to target your key consumer base and is a valuable way to grow your business and secure more direct bookings. However, when you set up a PPC advert and then fail to meet your revPar goals, the disappointment is massive. You want your PPC campaign to deliver bookings, and yet you can literally watch the tumbleweed as the clock ticks on, budget depletes and no reservations are made. What is going wrong?

Here are four potential reasons why your hotel’s PPC adverts are not delivering.

Here is an interesting fact. When it comes to PPC adverting, sales are generated from around 12% of keywords on average. The general feeling when it comes to paid advertising is to keyword everything to excess; you are paying for the leads, so you want the best results. However, this rarely works as a theory. Poorly performing keywords drain your budget and can impede your efforts to bolster direct bookings by delivering a higher cost per conversion than is desirable while also making it harder to pick out the keywords that are delivering better results. Your Google AdWords account can help you identify the keywords that work for you provided you have it properly structured and regularly review keyword performance in line with conversions. Removing keywords that are very broad may lead to a decrease in click throughs, but you should see an increase in conversion by focusing on better quality traffic. Cutting down on excess keywords can therefore help you achieve the direct bookings the campaign was intended for.

Hotel internet marketing is a crowded market, and sadly a lot of adverts tend to mimic each other and frankly, leave the user cold. To up the conversion and ROI from your paid advertising, you need copy that that is exciting and enticing. What are you offering your guests that no other hotel is, or more importantly that your competition has forgotten to highlight?

Don’t forget the all-important call to action either- it may seem obvious you are looking for direct bookings, but if you do not have the book now hook, you could find your advert is simply not compelling enough to attract potential customers.

Over 60% of internet users access websites on mobile devices (this includes mobile phones and tablets). You need to ensure that your site or landing page is optimised for mobile users following the click through. If your site isn’t responsive, it won’t be optimised for mobile users. This means a poor user experience and issues such as slow loading pages, large tracts of texts to scroll and impossible to use booking forms. It doesn’t matter how good your paid advertising is, a lack of mobile optimisation will see you losing sales originating from your PPC ads.

In a similar vein, you need to consider the booking process itself. If the booking process is complicated, even the best hotel internet marketing campaign will fail. This is the instant gratification generation – they are not interested in hanging around filling in form after form. Look for ways to help your customers out by speeding up the process with a modern, user-friendly booking engine optimised for desktop and mobile use.