Google Rolls Out Automated Performance Max Campaigns for Hotels

Google’s looking to help hotels maximize their promotional efforts with new Performance Max for Travel Goal ads, which effectively automate the ad creation process, based on your existing hotel listings.

As explained by Google:

“Performance Max for travel goals creates ads in multiple formats that will automatically serve across Google channels and inventory, including Google Maps, Search, YouTube and Hotel Ads (coming later this year). During campaign setup, just pick your hotel properties from a map using our hotel picker tool. Then it’ll pre-populate ads for your hotel – including creative elements like copy, images and URLs – in every format. You can edit any of these pre-populated assets or upload your own instead.”

The process streamlines the ad and campaign creation process, providing a range of automated prompts to build your ads from. Which could make it much easier to promote your hotels across all of the various Google formats – which is most likely where your target customers are searching.

Ad managers can maintain their Performance Max listings in Google Ads Manager, where you’ll have oversight of each element.

“The Insights page can help you better understand your performance, customers and business through information like demand forecasts and search trends. For example, search term insights show you what guests are searching for when they see your ad. Performance Max for travel goals gives you access to even more simplified property-level reporting and travel-specific campaign recommendations.”

Google says that a single Performance Max for travel goals campaign can support up to 100 hotel properties, and pre-populate recommended images, messages and other creative assets for each location. You can also measure and track campaign performance for each location in the ‘Hotels’ tab.

And the process has proven effective – Google says that advertisers who use Performance Max achieve 18% more conversions, at a similar cost per action.

It can be a bit disconcerting to trust your ad budget and process to AI tools, but increasingly, these options are getting better at maximizing performance. Meta has also reported similarly good results with its Advantage+ automated campaigns, and as machine learning systems improve at tracking and measuring user behavior, it stands to reason that they will eventually be better at allocating budgets, and maximizing ad performance.

It could be worth an experiment either way – you can learn more about Google’s Performance Max for Travel ads here.