- BrandVerity has released its report on The State of Branded Keywords in Paid Search, covering Q4 of 2014 in the US: some of the Trademark Users and OTAs are, of course, not the same as in the UK. However, UK hoteliers will be interested to see what’s happening: BrandVerity now estimates 31,653 lost visitors per month for a typical hotel brand in the US market.
The report has a section devoted to Hotels, where BrandVerity monitored the ads that appeared on searches for core brand terms of 25 popular hotel brands. Here are the headline findings:
- BrandVerity now estimates 31,653 lost visitors per month for a typical hotel brand.
- Some of the top Trademark Users in the hotel industry were hotelreservations.com, hotelroom.com, hotelsavings.com, priceline.com, and roomstays.com. Interestingly, neither Expedia nor Travelocity appeared in the list of Top 10 Trademark Users, though OTAs comprise the majority of the Top 10 Trademark Users.
- OTA activity increased on Bing, Yahoo and AOL—but remained relatively low on Google.
- For Hotel brands, OTAs continue to be the central issue. While OTA trademark bidding has almost entirely disappeared from Google and Google Mobile, it is still very present on AOL, Bing, and Yahoo. Hotel brands have done a good job of monitoring their brands on Google, but now they need to do the same on other search engines while also continuing to nuance their contracts with OTAs.
The full report is available here (the Hotels section begins on page 17).
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