How to overcome top Google Ads challenges in complex travel markets

Whether you’re a travel brand expanding into new markets, managing a network of affiliates, or an airline company fighting for the top spot – Adthena can help you achieve your goals.

Our award-winning AI driven, Whole Market View technology gives you visibility of the entire retail search landscape, so you can:

• Increase conversion volume to grow profitably
• Improve visibility and identify wasted budget on brand terms
• Contextualize performance with informed search insights

In this 3-step Enterprise search guide, reveal how leading travel brands like Booking.com, Expedia, and Avis can improve performance and overcome the top Google Ads challenges.

The Adthena Solution

With Adthena’s Market Trends you can monitor the trends and seasonality that really matter:

• Average CPCs in the market
• Competitor market shareShare of spend
• Share of impressions
• Average position

Monitoring trends day-to-day and over time gives you visibility into changes in your competitors’ paid search performance including threats and opportunities as they emerge. This insight will help you to make confident decisions about your paid search strategy and to answer key questions, such as “How do my competitors change their activity in most valuable trading times” and “How are my competitors distributing their spend at different times of the year?”

Cheapflights.com was able to take advantage of the market share. With this granular level of information, you can make real-time decisions in a market which has returned to 2019 competitive levels. These are prime opportunities to be smart and grab market share as levels have begun to return.

The Adthena Solution

Using Adthena’s Market Share report, you can understand whether competitors are willing to spend proportionately more to gain market share, and see whether this has driven up CPCs for particular search terms or categories. You’ll gain deep insight into competitor market share and share of spend, as well as performance metrics contextualizing what’s driving market share for each competitor. 

You can easily benchmark yourself against your top competitors, review your market position by category, or identify room for growth. We see below that hotels.com hold the greatest market share on desktop, whereas expedia.com is more aggressive on mobile.

The Adthena Solution

Adthena’s automated tools will show you which keywords are behind each competitive ad, how long and how frequently the ads run, how they are performing on the SERP, and even what competitors are spending in relation to their click share (aka spend efficiency). You can understand very granular correlations between copy and performance.

With this analysis, you can see exactly how your ads and those of your competitors are performing, including estimated impressions and clicks. This provides the power to ensure every ad and campaign has the right message to outperform competitive ads and bring in bookings.

Adthena’s Top Ads would show how Booking.com compares to its competitors, highlighting threats and opportunities.

The Adthena Solution

Adthena can help you to pinpoint low or high competition periods and set precise smart bidding targets for increased conversions. By analyzing competitors’ pricing, incentives, and market positioning, you can enhance relevance and boost CTR.  Adthena’s Smart Monitor tracks creative phrases in your competitive landscape, notifying you of new or high-performing phrases used by competitors so you can take instant action.

In this example using Smart Monitor, we see that expedia.com has incorporated new terms in their desktop ads: ‘top carriers’, ‘flexible tickets’, and ‘airplane tickets’.

The Adthena Solution

With Adthena’s Brand Protection solution, you can catch illegal trademark infringements and identify competitors who could be stealing clicks from you and damaging your brand equity. You can also safeguard against ad click hijackers with automatic alerts on affiliates impersonating your ads, capture evidence, and submit to Google in just a few clicks.

Adthena’s Ad Hijacking provides a customized view of affiliate ad hijacks, which could help travel brands like Avis Budget Group detect fraudulent affiliate links redirecting customers to faux landing pages. In this example, we can identify 10 ad-hijacking instances, each with a unique affiliate identifier and ad evidence which can be used as evidence and submitted to Google.

The Adthena Solution

Adthena’s multi-award-winning Brand Activator indexes your targeted brand terms to identify when your brand is first for a term in both paid and organic rankings, and no other brands are advertising on that term – we call these “Lone Rangers”. Lone Rangers will then be paused automatically, preventing any unnecessary bids and saving up to 20% on wasted brand spend.

Using Adthena’s Brand Activator, we see here that loveholidays.com has identified $18,420 savings during the specified time period by pausing bidding on Lone Rangers and adding them to the negative keyword list.