How are Google Ads best used for vacation rental booking?
Google offers a wide range of advertising products and placements, and our experience is that Search advertising is by far the most effective way to drive profitable bookings.
Search advertising is probably what comes to mind when you think of Google Ads—someone searches ‘vacation rentals lake tahoe’ and ads are the first things that pop up. It can be an incredibly effective channel because your ad is being placed in front of someone at the exact moment that they’re searching for exactly what you offer. There is no other advertising channel that can pinpoint purchase intent like that!
Another major benefit of Google Search advertising is that, unlike SEO, you can very quickly have a link to your website at, or very close to, the top of the search results. However, also unlike SEO, you’re going to have to pay for those clicks to your site. Because each click incurs an additional cost, it’s important to understand what types of searches people are using to find your site, how much you’re paying for each click, and how likely those people are to book once they’ve landed on your site. In short, because of the incremental cost from Google Ads, it’s important to make sure that those clicks are turning into bookings at a profitable rate.
We have found that the single most important component of profitable campaigns, is your site showing up on high-intent search terms. This may sound simple, but we’ve audited numerous accounts where clients had been paying for clicks from people searching things like ‘furnished short term rentals,’ ‘hotels near me,’ ‘snowboard rentals,’ ‘boat rentals,’ and more. These clients spent literally thousands of dollars on these clicks and received no bookings from them. We’ve spent years fine-tuning our keyword lists and can guarantee that our clients will only pay for clicks that are relevant to their business and indicate high booking-intent.
Appearing on the right searches is the first step. Beyond that, we take clients’ average revenue per booking, margin they’re making on each booking, and overall website conversion rate, and with that information, we determine how much each campaign can afford to pay per click, how well it will need to convert, and which keywords we should target to ensure we can produce profitable results. Basically, we think of paid search as a big math problem—we use your data and combine it with our platform knowledge and industry experience to spit out a positive and sustainable ROI for your business.