Seba BlancoI help independent hotels sell more effectively and operate smarter by combining hotel technology with sales and marketing.
Do not index
Do not index
Search your own hotel name on Google right now. Chances are Booking.com, Expedia, or another OTA is sitting at the top of the page — bidding on your brand and collecting commissions on guests who came looking for you specifically.
A well-built brand defence campaign reverses that. It puts your direct booking link at the top of the auction, at a fraction of what OTAs pay, and protects the bookings that should already be yours. Here's the structure I implement for hotel clients — refined across dozens of hospitality accounts.
Keep brand and non-brand campaigns separate
The most common structural mistake I find when auditing hotel Google Ads accounts is brand and non-brand keywords thrown into the same campaign. It dilutes Quality Scores, makes budget control impossible, and produces unreadable data.
Create one campaign exclusively for brand terms. Name it clearly — for example:
[Property Name] | Brand | Search | EN.For keywords, use exact match and phrase match only. Never broad match on brand. Exact match for
[your hotel name], phrase match for variations like "your hotel name booking", "your hotel name rooms", "your hotel name official site". Add common misspellings manually — Google doesn't always catch them.Negative keywords matter just as much. Add OTA names (booking.com, expedia, hotels.com, trivago, kayak), competitor hotels in your area, and generic terms like "cheap hotels". Without these, your brand budget leaks onto users already shopping on competitor platforms. Per Google Ads Help, brand campaigns for known-name searches typically earn Quality Scores of 8–10, which keeps your CPC well below what OTAs pay for the same auction.
Write ad copy that beats the OTA on trust
Your ad needs to immediately signal this is the official direct option, not another intermediary.
- Headline 1: "Official Site" or "Book Direct" — the clearest trust signal against OTAs claiming to sell your rooms.
- Headline 2: A direct booking incentive — free cancellation, best rate guarantee, complimentary breakfast, room upgrade for direct bookers.
- Display URL path:
/book-director/official.
- Sitelinks: Rooms and Rates, Special Offers, Contact, About.
- Callouts: "Best Rate Guaranteed", "No Booking Fees", "Free Cancellation Available".
If your ad and the OTA's ad say the same thing, users default to the OTA — they trust the platform. Give them a concrete, specific reason to click yours instead.
Set bidding and budget correctly
Google phased out commission-based bidding for Hotel Ads on 20 February 2025 (Sojern, 2025). If you were relying on that model, it's gone. For brand search campaigns:
- Under 30 conversions/month: Use Maximise Clicks with a manual CPC cap. €3 to €5 is reasonable for most independents — brand competition is lower than on generic destination queries.
- 30+ conversions/month: Switch to Target ROAS. Start at 5:1 and raise it as data accumulates. Luxury brand campaigns routinely hit 6:1 to 10:1.
Brand auctions are small — typically you and one or two OTAs. €5 to €15 per day is enough to hold strong impression share for most independent properties. Let the Impression Share metric guide your scaling decisions, not your gut.
Add trademark protection as a second layer
Brand campaigns defend your position inside the auction. Trademark protection works alongside them. If your hotel name is a registered trademark, you can file a complaint with Google against specific advertisers using it in their ad copy (Google Ads Trademark Policy). Complaints must name advertisers individually — there is no blanket enforcement.
Once Google upholds the complaint, the advertiser can still bid on your keyword, but their ad cannot include your hotel name in the headline or description. The result: a generic accommodation ad on a hyper-specific brand search. Their Quality Score collapses, their CPC rises, and click-through rate drops.
I've seen this combination — active brand campaign plus trademark complaint — cut an OTA's overlap rate from over 70% to below 20% within a single quarter for a boutique client. Don't pick one or the other. Use both.
Measure what matters
Track these from day one. After 30 days you'll have a clear picture.
- Impression Share: Target 90%+ on brand terms. Below 85% means you're losing auctions — check whether the loss is to budget (scale spend) or rank (improve Quality Score and CPC cap).
- Average position: 1 or 2, consistently. If an OTA regularly holds position 1 on your own name, raise the CPC cap or tighten ad relevance.
- ROAS: 5:1 is the floor. Well-structured hotel brand campaigns exceed 8:1, and Hospitalitynet reports 8:1 to 15:1 is standard when direct booking pages are optimised. Below 5:1 is almost always a landing page problem, not a campaign problem.
- Auction Insights: Run monthly at campaign level. It tells you exactly which OTAs are bidding on your brand and how often they win.
- GA4 conversion tracking: Booking confirmation page views must be tracked as conversions, with Google Ads linked to GA4. Without this, ROAS is unreliable and Target ROAS bidding cannot function. Set it up before launch, not after.
The bottom line
A brand defence campaign isn't optional for an independent hotel. Every booking that flows through an OTA on a branded search is a booking you paid commission for unnecessarily. The setup above — clean structure, tight match types, OTA negatives, trust-signal ad copy, trademark protection, and real measurement — costs less than most hotels spend on a single OTA campaign, and it protects the most valuable traffic you already have.
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Written by
Seba Blanco
I help independent hotels sell more effectively and operate smarter by combining hotel technology with sales and marketing.