After running its Hotel Ads offering in beta last year, Bing Ads is going to be rolling them out in general release. Bing Ads’ initial partner is travel advertising platform Koddi, which also participated in the beta.
Hotel Ads in Bing results
Bing’s Hotel Ads experience is much like Google’s. The interface gives searchers a fast way to input travel dates and instantly see pricing across different travel engines.
There are also “sort” options so users can look at best match, price or rating. The ratings feature a TripAdvisor integration (which has long been part of Bing’s organic travel and hotel search results) that displays the number of reviews and TripAdvisor ranking of a hotel. Hotel Ads also feature multiple image cards for hotels and an interactive map powered by Bing Maps so users can refine or customize their hotel searches further.
How data is supplied
The hotel data is populated via an XML feed named the Hotel Feed that advertisers assemble, containing data such as hotel name, phone number, address and location.
There is a separate XML feed called the Point of Sale Feed, which details the sites that users can use to book rooms.
Once both feeds are imported, advertisers can then push or pull itinerary data for hotel properties via Transaction Messages.
There will be a new PPC campaign type that is similar to what exists for Shopping. Accounts can be organized into accounts, subaccounts, hotel groups and finally hotels, with multiple levels of bidding available to advertisers.
Koddi advertisers will have access to Bing Hotel Ads through the Koddi platform upon general release.
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About The Author
Susan Wenograd is a paid media consultant, with 14 years in the digital marketing industry. While the last 10 have been primarily focused on paid media, she’s also had extensive experience in email marketing and content creation. She has worked both agency and in-house, managing multiple millions of dollars in the span of her career. She speaks internationally and blogs regularly about paid media tactics on her website.