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DIGITAL TRENDS HOTEL INDUSTRY FOR THE

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Page 1: DIGITAL TRENDS - Net Affinity Blog · the most important digital trends facing hoteliers today. We’re basing our advice on trends that the data tells us are emerging right in our

DIGITAL TRENDSHOTEL INDUSTRY

FOR THE

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NET AFFINITYWelcome to the first edition of our digital trends report, designed

to be the essential companion for the savvy independent hotelier.

Our conversion optimisation, revenue management and marketing

specialists, along with key members of our team, have analyzed

the most important digital trends facing hoteliers today. We’re

basing our advice on trends that the data tells us are emerging

right in our industry.

Our goal is to better inform and empower you in your work to

drive more direct bookings through your brand site, and we hope

these digital trends will do just that.

We’re giving our expert opinion on the major changes and

patterns of note in the industry, and we hope you’ll use them to

improve your direct business.

We love hotels. With our experience in hospitality and passion for

achievement, our job is simple: we make yours easier.

William Cotter Managing Director

Website: www.netaffinity.com

Phone: +353 1 293 9906

Email: [email protected]

The Forum, Ballymoss Road,

Sandyford, Dublin 18, D18 VE83, Ireland

GET IN TOUCH

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WE’VE ANALYZED NEARLY 6 MILLION WEB SESSIONS. HERE’S THE STORY FOR HOTELS’ DIGITAL PRESENCE TODAY.

Our report focuses on current cornerstone items for hoteliers. We’ve analysed the data from nearly 6,000,000 hotel website

sessions, including digital transactions, booking patterns and more, and compared what we are seeing with industry trends at

large.

The report focuses on what the story is right now: we’ve analyzed the most important recent data to give you sharp insights into

the current state of play. We’ve covered booking patterns, guest demographics, the best ways to show your prices and rate

plans on your site, web design best practices, the traffic landscape, and much more.

Each chapter gives a concise summary of the data, commentary on what it means for hotels, and clear actions points to help

you get the most out of it.

The data reviewed the following from 1st August – 31st October 2016:

5,954,000 website sessions

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

01/05 Who’s Travelling?

02/1 1 Booking Behaviour

03/21 Booking Insights

04/26 Device Trends

05/30 Design Trends

06/36 The Hotel Traffic Landscape

The demographics of guests. Who spends more,

who books more, and where do they come from?

Patterns in the days to purchase & analysis of

guest bookings. When are guests likely to book -

and to cancel?

How do price displays impact the booking

process? What’s the most effective way to display

prices?

The ongoing advance of mobile. Mobile continues

its march to dominate traffic - but is revenue

keeping up?

Design options to suit every hotel. Which is best

for your hotel? How can you ensure a speedy site?

Changes in the traffic landscape are driven by

large external forces, although individual hotels will

see differing results.

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WHO’S TRAVELLING?

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WHO ARE YOUR GUESTS?Do you know who your guests are? Do men or women book more often, and who’s spending more? Good hotel marketing is all

about talking to the right person at the right time. So we took a look at the demographics, and laid it out for you below.

The women top the charts on all fronts*

• Sessions: 70% of website sessions are from female users. The remaining 30% are male.

• Transactions: 62% of Ecommerce transactions are from female users, and the remaining 35% are male.

• Revenue: 67% of Ecommerce revenue is from female users, indicating a larger value per booking than their male counterparts.

*E-commerce conversion rates interestingly show that men of all ages convert at a higher rate than women, which indicates when men do visit your

website, they are more likely to complete a transaction. This may be a case of men doing more research off-site, men doing less research overall, or

women doing the research and asking men to book!

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Sessions: Women age 25-34 contribute to the highest volume of website sessions at 21%. The 65+ crowd contribute

the least, with just 4%. This might be due simply to older guests preferring to research and book through more

traditional methods, or younger people may be doing more intense price and property research.

Transactions and Revenue: Women 25-34 contribute to the most transactions at 20%, 65+ the least at 3.5%. This pattern most likely

goes hand in hand with the sessions pattern above – if you get significantly more traffic from those who are 25-34, it makes sense that

transactions follow this pattern. The same story holds for revenue, with 24-35 contributing 21% of revenue and those above 65 at only 4%.

Sessions: Age 35-44 contribute to the highest volume of website sessions at 8%, 65+ the least with just 2.5%.

Transactions and Revenue: Men convert at a higher rate than women, although they contribute many less transactions

and much less revenue overall. 25-34 contribute to the most transactions at 11%, a full 3% over their website sessions percentage figure.

Meanwhile, 65+ contribute the least at 3% of transactions – still half a percentage point above their sessions. In terms of revenue, those

25-34 contribute to the most revenue at 11.5%. 65+ contribute the least, at 2%.

Source: Google Analytics Demographic DataData representative of: Age 66.75% of sessions / Gender 68.15% of sessions Date Range: August 1st 2016 to October 31st 2016

WOMEN

MEN

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1. Track your demographics carefully and look at individual markets. Our figures are averaged across

hundreds of hotels and cover different markets, and yours might be quite different!

2. Act on your knowledge. If you find that you’re booked almost exclusively by younger people, or by women,

market to them. Create special offers specifically for your most frequent guests.

3. Make sure your marketing spend accounts for the natural peaks and lows of different markets.

Not all markets travel at the same rate each month or season.

ACTION POINTS

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BEHAVIOURBEFORE & AFTER BOOKING

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BOOKER BEHAVIOUR BEFORE BOOKINGDAYS TO PURCHASE

How many days on your hotel website does it typically take to persuade someone to book? The answer: usually, only one!

On all devices, a vast majority of transactions happen on the first day they visit your site. However, for all devices, around

13% of bookings happen between Day 1 and Day 13. The final 7% of bookings happen after 14 days. This has increased

since August, with transactions happening after 14 days up 46% on Desktop and 17% on mobile.

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When we take away Day 0 (the first day of visits to the hotel website) to better look at the data for other days,

we can see that a bulk of mobile bookings happened faster than desktop or tablet bookings. The percentage

of transactions exceeds desktop significantly, up to and including Day 4.

MOBILE GUESTS BOOK FASTER

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A website session is each individual visit taken by a user. That means it’s perfectly possible for a person to have 3 sessions in 1

day, making the data interesting enough to look at separately from days. Looking at sessions prior to purchase, a bigger share

of transactions happen in the first session on desktop (69%) compared to mobile (62%). Transactions decline steadily for each

successive session on all devices, although they decline slightly more slowly on desktop.

NB: Cross-device browsing is not accounted for here, so some of the transactions happening on Day 0 or in Session 1 may have been preceded

by research over multiple days and/or sessions on a different device. At the moment, the only way to account for cross device shopping is to have

users signed in on all devices they use. Finding a solution to trace cross device traffic is the Billion Dollar Question!

SESSIONS TO PURCHASE

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BOOKING BEHAVIOUR AFTER BOOKING

We took a look at the behaviour of bookers before and after their purchase. Here’s what’s happened for all booking transactions which

arrived between August & October 2016

• 29% of all bookings that arrived in the past 3 months were made within just one week of arrival.

• Bookings made within a month of arrival account for 57% bookings overall.

• All is not lost for your long term predictive power, though: 24% of bookings were made more than 60 days prior to arrival!

When we looked a little deeper at booking windows for individual countries, we found that those travelling further book further in

advance. The greater the distance, the greater the lead in time. This makes perfect sense: Long distance travel is a bigger commitment,

and most likely involves a flight purchase, etc. It does highlight the importance of geo-targeting rate plans in your marketing efforts. Be

sure the most relevant rate plan is shown at the right time.

BOOKING WINDOWS

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We compared the booking and

cancellations percentages per

window. It’s interesting to note that

the percentage of cancellations

outstrips that of bookings close to

arrival!

With such a high rate of

cancellations close to arrival, it

would seem this is an area that

needs attention. Keep in touch

with the booker via pre-stay emails

and up selling notices. You’re

responsible for keeping them

engaged before their stay!

CANCELLATION WINDOWS

COMPARISON OF BOOKING & CANCELLATION WINDOWS

After a person books a room, how close to arrival are they likely to cancel? The answer: as close to arrival as they can!

43% of cancellations were made within the week of arrival. 72% are made within the month of arrival.

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People are more active early in the week. Monday, Tuesday &

Wednesday are the most popular booking days, accounting for 49%

combined.

Monday is highest with 17% of bookings. You could put this down to

the need to cheer ourselves up after returning to work of a Monday,

but for now we’ll withhold judgment.

Over the past 3 months, as expected, Friday and Saturday see the

largest amount of arrivals. Tuesday & Wednesday see the fewest, at

only 11% each.

Sunday, often unfairly deemed the slowest day of the week, had 15%

of arrivals – go Sunday!

BOOKINGS BY DAY OF THE WEEK

ARRIVALS BY DAY OF THE WEEK

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BOOKINGS BY HOUR OF THE DAY

Unsurprisingly, the evening times see an increase in transactions. 8pm – 11pm are the top booking hours, accounting for 22%

of all transactions in just 3 hours.

From 11am -7pm, bookings are steady at 6% per hour. This means people are shopping during traditional working hours!

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What do people want? Clear, widely recognisable and easily understood

rate plans:

• 46% of bookings were for the ‘Best Available Rate Plans’

• This includes BAR, Room Only, and Bed & Breakfast

• 10% of bookings included dinner

• 8% of bookings were ‘stay longer & save’ deals

• 7% of bookings were for pre-pay offers

• 1% of bookings were sale offers

• The rest were a variety of bespoke, event & corporate offers

46%BOOKED

‘BEST AVAILABLE’ RATE PLANS

With so many hotels, each with their own type of inventory, not all fall

into a regular room category.

With that caveat in mind…

• *44% of bookings were for all types of standard rooms

• **13% of bookings were for deluxe rooms types

• 13% of bookings for superior/suite rooms

• 6% for a variety of self-catering options

*This includes, single, single occupancy, double, double & single, twin, triple, family

**For some properties, ‘deluxe’ is their standard room. For others it’s an upgrade, so we’ve mentioned it separately

BOOKINGS BY RATE PLAN

BOOKINGS BY ROOM TYPE44%

BOOKED‘STANDARD’

ROOM TYPES

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After analysing rate plans and room types in detail, the resounding feedback is to keep it simple.

Don’t over-complicate the process with cumbersome or ambiguous names and descriptions. You only have a short amount of time to

sell a potential guest on staying, so don’t make it hard for them to figure out which is the best room and rate plan to book!

ACTION POINTS1. Make a great first impression, but don’t forget to drive further engagements. As so many transactions

happen ithe first time a user visits a website (their first session) or on the first day, it’s vital to put your best foot forward. At

the same time, don’t discount the users who come back multiple times. Keep them engaged with remarketing campaigns

and a booking recovery program.

2. Clearly explain the differences between your different standards of room type. What’s the difference

between each type? Why it is worth paying more? Is the room larger, does it have additional features? Make your selling

points clear.

3. When creating a new rate plan, consider the following:

• Is it going to compete with an existing rate plan?

• Does an existing rate plan need to be retired to make room for the new?

• Ensure offers do not become over loaded.

4. Be sure you go through the booking process as a guest would do so:

• Take the time to read the descriptions and look at the price display.

• If anything is causing you to pause, you can be sure it is causing potential guests to do more than just pause!

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BOOKING INSIGHTS

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BOOKING INSIGHTSHow do people behave in the booking funnel? Net Affinity’s team of conversion scientists have made a thorough study of user behaviour

during bookings. While not all findings will be relevant to every booking engine, we wanted to take you through some of the highlights

of our research.

PRICING METHODS

SINGLE PRICING METHODS (ONLY ONE PRICING METHOD USED ACROSS THE SITE)

Hotels using a total pricing method (either per room, per night or total stay) convert at a 20% higher conversion rate than hotels using

a per person pricing method (either per person, per person sharing or per person per night).

• This is likely due to users ‘flinching’ when they see the total price only when they reach the payment stage. While you do lose some

bookers at the beginning of the booking funnel by displaying total price up front, you still come out ahead of those using per person

pricing methods.

On desktop, the best performing pricing display method (total pricing) outperforms the lowest converting pricing

display method (per person pricing) by 74%.

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MULTIPLE PRICING METHODS (DIFFERENT PRICING METHODS USED ACROSS THE SITE)

Hotels using total pricing methods receive 5% more bookings on desktop and 7% more bookings on mobile than hotels using per person

pricing methods.

Conversion rates decline when more pricing methods are used. Hotels displaying their prices using a single pricing method (e.g. all

rates are listed as “per room”) convert at a 22% higher conversion rate than hotels using a mix of 4 or more pricing methods.

• This same logic applies to rate plans. There should be a minimum of 3 rate plans in use to help with comparison, but beyond that,

the more rate plans, the lower the conversion rate.

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ACTION POINTS1. Keep to a single pricing method across your site. Otherwise, you risk confusing visitors and lowering

conversion rates.

2. Use a total pricing method rather than a per person pricing method. While you may lose a few users

at the start of the booking process this way, you’ll retain more at the end and get more bookings overall.

3. Observe your own booking funnel carefully. Every booking engine is different, and yours will certainly have

settings and steps that are either improving or hurting your conversions. Figure out ways to make yours as friendly as

possible to your guests.

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DEVICE TRENDS

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THE DEVICE LANDSCAPE HAS EXPERIENCED SIGNIFICANT CHANGES OVER THE LAST 12 MONTHS.

Mobile devices continue to break boundaries

and we are witnessing month on month growth.

Mobile surpassed desktop traffic in Q3 2015 and

has continued to gain traffic share ever since.

As of our most recent data, mobile contributed

53% of total website visits.

Revenue contribution from mobile continues to gain share, with

an average of 28% of revenue being recorded from mobile

devices.

The disparity between the volume of traffic and e-commerce

is reflective of cross-device shopping behaviour. One scenario

might be a user starting their research on mobile and completing

the transaction on desktop.

Tablet devices are in slow decline. Since

peaking in July 2015, the tablet has witnessed

a slow decline.

As of our most recent data, tablet

traffic contributes just 13% of all

website visits.

This is down from a peak of 19% in July 2015.

Revenue contribution from tablet mirrors the traffic volume. As

of October 2016, tablet contributed to 15% of website revenue,

down 6% from a peak of 21% in July 2015.

Mobile Tablet

Here’s what matters:

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Desktop traffic has been in decline since July 2014. If we look at October 2016, 34% of all visits are from

desktop devices. The same time last year, this number was only 41%. That’s a significant drop of 7% in

desktop traffic within a 12 month window. The surplus of this traffic is going to mobile.

Despite relatively low traffic volumes, desktop remains the largest ecommerce device with 57% of revenue.

However, this has also witnessed a 7% decline in the past 12 months (57% versus 64%). As mentioned, this is as a result of cross device

shopping behaviour. Users are doing the majority of their research on mobile devices, but some transfer to desktop to complete their

ecommerce transactions.

Desktop

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1. Mobile should be your number one focus going forward. Everything you do should be mobile first! This

includes design, content, marketing, and even SEO.

2. You must consider the cross-device shopper. Your users may be using up to 3 devices to complete their

research and bookings – be prepared!

3. Content and rate plans should be accessible from all devices. This means there is a requirement for

fully responsive, adaptive, or bespoke mobile websites. If you don’t already have one, now is the time!

ACTION POINTS

This data is based across all Net Affinity Clients and sourced from Google Analytics

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DESIGN TRENDS

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MOBILE SOLUTIONS FOR YOUR WEBSITEConsidering that a large chunk of traffic is driven by mobile

devices and mobile traffic is rising continuously, it is hard

to fathom not having a mobile solution for your website.

However, discerning the real differences between the

available options can be touch. Design is moving away from

mobile specific sites to responsive design, especially in light

of Google changing to a mobile-first index. Adaptive design

adoption is still lagging behind due to technology restrictions

and prohibitively high costs, however, the industry is likely to

head towards this design in the future.

A bespoke mobile site is the original solution for mobile

traffic. This is a stand-alone site and usually includes

less content, simplified navigation and fewer images.

Advantages

01

02

03

Optimised for mobile users in terms of usability, load time and content.

More cost effective than an adaptive site

The ability to include mobile-spicific features makes a bespoke site more flexible than a responsive design

Disadvantages

Multiple sites to manage (desktop & mobile)

The redirect to the mobile domain can cause a slower load time.

01

02

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Adaptive design, or dynamic design, identifies the de-

vices visitors are using and loads a device specific ver-

sion of the site. This requires (at least) 3 different ver-

sions of your site, one for each device category. When

a visitor lands on the site, only the resources required

for the user’s device will be downloaded.

Advantages

Disadvantages

01

02

03

04

05

Fast load time as only necessary resourcesare loaded

Only 1 site to manage

Cohesive experience across all design

No device redirect (positive for load time)

Easy to optimise because as devices shrink, sites can be optimized by removing features that slow load times

High development costs for true adaptive design.01

Disadvantages

01

02

Slow load time on mobile as all resources are loaded for all devices.

Because responsive design is a design choice rather than a content choice, it does not always account for different behavioural needs of mobile visitors. You must account for these needs regardless of which design you choose.

In responsive design, the layout of the website responds

to a visitor’s device and changes based on the screen

size and capabilities of the device.

Advantages

01

02

03

Only 1 site to manage.

No device redirect (positive for load time)

Cohesive experience across all devices.

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SITE WEIGHT:WHY DOES ITMATTER SO MUCH?

Performance Budget : There are many different factors which have an effect on how

quickly your hotel website loads. Processing power, browser,

and bandwidth are just a few. However, the most important thing

for you to consider when building your hotel website is the site

weight.

Site weight is the digital “weight” of all the pages on your site. Weight

comes from images, text, video, and the coding that structures your

pages.

How heavy is too heavy? To figure that out, we can look at the

average page weight today. That’s 2.5 MB as of October 2016,

and it’s growing rapidly – page size nearly doubled from 2012 to

2015 (Radware).

To keep track of how much your pages and your site weigh, we

recommend talking to your web designers about a performance

budget.

A performance budget is a group of limits on certain values that

affect site performance and speed. There are a few different

types or performance budget, but a straightforward one is total

page size.

To the left, you’ll see an example of a hypothetical performance

budget in action. For this example, we have set ourselves a Total

Page size of 2 MB to work with, which would give a download

time of less than a second on an average 4G connection.

Header Section

Cost 40KB of

2MB budget

Carousel Section

Cost 190KB of

2MB budget

Banner Section

Cost 130KB of2MB budget

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WHAT’S WEIGHING YOUR SITE DOWN?Images are a huge part of any site, and that’s especially true for hotels. Images are almost always the heaviest part of your website. In fact,

the hotel sites we build are usually 70-80% images, in terms of weight.

Since visuals are so vital for hotels, it makes sense that you want to show off your property from every angle. However, the key is balance!

Balance your site performance with how many images you want in your galleries and on your pages. Remember that for every image,

you’re adding on a small fraction of time to your load speed. Time is money when it comes to site speed. For every additional second a

website takes to load, many users will abandon your site. Also, for mobile users with limited data, loading dozens of images will literally

cost them money!

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These figures are from: https://www.radware.com/newsevents/mediacoverage/ page-bloat-update*

THE GRAPH BELOW GIVES A BREAKDOWN OF WHERE ALL THOSE KILOBYTES ARE GOING.

To the right, you’ll see a typical breakdown of a website.

As you can see, images are by far the heaviest part of almost any

website. The more images you can live without, the lighter and

faster your site will be.

All the text is within the HTML section of the site - no matter how

wordy you get, you’re probably not going to slow your site down!

Video is a relatively new weight on the scales, but it’s set to

become a big one. Keep your eyes on it.

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1. Before choosing a mobile solution to either create or upgrade your current site to,

carefully consider your options. Bespoke mobile sites, adaptive sites and responsive sites all have their

pros and cons. Take into account your available budget, your goals for the site, and the size of your current site.

2. Talk to your web designer about creating a performance budget. This is an early step in the

design process - you need to consider it from the start. A performance budget is a tool to let you see which

elements of your site may be slowing it down. It will show you where best to add new elements or trim away

current ones.

3. Consider removing unnecessary images. They are almost certainly taking up the vast bulk of your

website, so look at how many guests are actually viewing. Keep your images to the best and most essential.

ACTION POINTS

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THE HOTEL TRAFFIC LANDSCAPE

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PAID TRAFFIC HAS INCREASED ANYWHERE FROM 10-20% OVER THE LAST 12 MONTHS.This is a direct result of the fact that spend is becoming more integral to hotel’s marketing mixes, and that must be reflected in

budgets in order to continue growing.

These trends are, by their nature, very generalized. Individual hotels will see different traffic patterns depending on many factors.

These include ad spend, where that spend is going, which channels are most profitable, how they’re managing their rates and

availability on third party channels, and a hundred other factors.

However, outside influences are imposing these general changes on the industry, and many hotels are taking note. Those

outside influences aren’t all bad news! What matters, ultimately, is driving revenue, and across our clients we’re seeing stronger

engagement and, on average, a 9% increase in conversion rates over the past year.

Here are 6 of the biggest reasons from the last 12 months for these industry-wide traffic shifts:

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01 EXTENDED TEXT ADSGoogle has recently introduced Extended Text Ads. This is the biggest change since AdWords was born 15 years ago. Google has

announced that every text ad will be an ETA by the end of January 2017.

• Headlines are expanding from a single 25-character headline to two 30-character headlines.

• Descriptions are growing from two 35-character lines to one 80-character description line.

• Display URLs will have the domain automatically extracted from the final URL. Advertisers will be able to add up to two paths to

enhance the URL.

ETAs are double the size of the ads we’re familiar with.

On desktop, this mostly equates to wider, not taller ads.

On mobile, however, these new ad formats push organic results

far down the page. We are seeing 3 screen scrolls before you

reach an organic listing.

02 MORE TEXT ADSOn desktop devices, Google removed right-hand text ads and now mostly shows 4 text ads instead of 2 or 3 text ads, pushing organic

search results further down the page. The ads still carry rich features, including site links and location extensions that increase the page

space they take up.

This has resulted in less engagement with organic listings. Google is also continuing to redesign ads for a more organic look, making the

paid listings more appealing to the average viewer. For context, 50% of adults don’t recognise ads in Google’s search results.

6 KEY REASONS FOR TRAFFIC SHIFTS

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03 THE KNOWLEDGE PANELFor some search results, the knowledge panel has become more prominent. The

panel is made up of organic and paid material. The organic material consists of maps,

reviews and images, and the paid content is driven by Google Hotel Ads.

Hotel Ads allow individual hotels to display hotel pricing and the hotel’s own booking

link directly in Knowledge panels – territory previously reserved for OTAs.

Google is also pushing call extensions. On mobile, these are driving traffic that would

previously have gone to websites to phones instead.

04 UPDATES TO GOOGLE’S MOBILE ALGORITHMGoogle has recently announced the creation of a mobile-first index, meaning that mobile-friendly sites are going to be indexed and updated

before any desktop sites.

This is a big sign of how far Google wants to go to optimize mobile users’ experience. This announcement was made on October 13th, just

5 months after Google’s additional ranking boost for mobile-friendly websites.

Sites that are already mobile-friendly won’t see much of a change. However, sites without mobile responsiveness are likely to start seeing

a big one, and should prepare accordingly.

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05 CALL ACTIVITYHotels are seeing an increase in call activity. From our own data, we can see that phone call extensions within our ads show significant call

volumes to hotels.

This is reflective of the increased ‘book on the go’ nature of users. It may also stem from increased mobile activity coupled with continued

resistance to actually booking on mobile. Users may research hotels on their phone, but prefer to call to book rather than attempt to

navigate a mobile booking process.

06 TRAVEL RESEARCH ON SOCIAL MEDIAThere is an increased adoption of social channels, and users are researching travel content via social channels. It’s

very likely that this traffic is being shifted from organic search, given that users are getting peer recommendations

and doing these searches on social rather than search engines.

On the hotel side, hotels are driving the shift to social by being more active on social channels. They are running

Facebook campaigns, retargeting campaigns and other paid campaigns through social.

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1. Be aware of the external reasons traffic is changing, and monitor channel performance. It’s

essential to hotels’ future digital presence to be aware of the different causes that have led to this traffic shift, and to be

aware of which channels are rising and falling in popularity among travelers.

2. The traffic landscape is changing, not undergoing a crisis. Hoteliers must adapt, but there are quick

and practical ways to make the adjustments.

3. Prepare for Extended Text Ads to replace all previous text ads in January 2017.

4. Increase your attention to paid search efforts. As channels, especially Google, put more and more

emphasis on pay-for-play, these efforts will pay off over the next 12 months and beyond.

ACTION POINTS

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CONTRIBUTORSMaeve Walls

Hollie Faulkner

Christiane Foller

Gemma Hynes

Brian Malone

Michael O’Reilly

Taylor Smariga

Ji Hye Uhm

Head of Revenue Strategy

Director of Marketing

Conversion Optimisation Specialist

Head of Client Management

Web Development Manager

Web Developer

Conversion Data Analyst & Distributor

UI/UX Designer

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