Last week, search giant Google announced the global release of a new advertising feature for hotels called ‘property promotion ads’.

In the announcement, the search engine explained that this new ad format will help advertisers to be seen by people who haven’t decided on the hotel they would like to stay at in a particular area. Google explained that the existing standard hotel booking ads are designed to target users who have already selected their hotel, while the new property promotion ads are designed to allow hotels to influence the decisions of searchers.

As these ads will feature prominently in results for queries on geographical locations, hotels will be able to target searches related to their specific locations. The ads are also displayed in Google Maps, and Google has revealed that it’s also experimenting with placing them in other areas.

The following example was given of what these ads look like on both desktop and mobile:

Before its worldwide launch, Google piloted the new ads, and Koddi, a travel management company, was one of the testers. A spokesperson for the company said that the new ads have increased the visibility of the hotels featured in them, and they helped to create awareness in markets where the hotels may not have typically ranked high in search results.

Previously, the ability to run property promotion ads was only possible through a whitelist, but now, hotels will now be able to bid on these ads through Google Ads itself. They are available via an ad group type in the Hotel Campaign section of Google Ads, and all active advertisers for hotel campaigns will be eligible to make use of the new ads.

These new property promotion ads are yet another way of reaching people online via advertising. If you’d like to start advertising your business on the web, contact our team at Engage Web to find out how we can help.

Search giant Google recently confirmed it is testing out a new feature to provide users with cost estimates in a local panel when they make a (more…)

Search giant Google has announced that it is phasing out the use of third-party tracking cookies on its Chrome browser.

Cookies are used to store pieces of information about a user’s activity on a website. They have many uses, such as “remembering” details like a user being logged on or the products in a shopping basket. Third-party tracking cookies, on the other hand, aren’t just contained to a single site – they effectively tail a user as they move around different websites, and can let a website know if you were looking at a specific product, which means it can then show you an ad for it on a different part of the web.

This is probably sounding somewhat familiar – looking at an item of clothing, for example, and then when you leave the site, you start seeing ads for the clothes everywhere. This is a third-party tracking cookie in action.

Google has now announced that it’s removing the use of these cookies on Chrome, following in the footsteps of browser giants Safari and Mozilla Firefox, both of which block them already by default.

According to the BBC, this news has been met with some scepticism, with several critics voicing their concern that Google’s plans would ultimately stop its rivals from being able to create catalogues of information for ad targeting, but Google itself may still be able to via alternate means. However, in its announcement, Google also firmly stated that it will not be creating any new, alternative identifier tools to track users across the internet, and it will not be using any such tools in its products.

The move to phase out cookies is the result of regulations getting tighter over the years, along with an increased awareness of internet users in matters concerning their privacy. However, businesses that use third-party tracking cookies to advertise have many other options available to them that don’t rely on cookies. Facebook Ads, for example, can be targeted using data that users provide to the social network, such as age, gender, location and what pages they like. PPC (pay-per-click) is another form of digital advertising that uses keywords users put into Google.

If you’re looking to advertise on the web, whether that’s through PPC, Facebook Ads or alternate means, give us a call at Engage Web and see how we can help.