Microsoft Ads has changed to hotels and real estate ads

Starting from February 6, the ability to create subaccounts and manage bids in Lodging Campaigns will be discontinued. Moving forward, marketers will exclusively handle placement decisions through Lodging Campaigns.

Despite these changes, marketers will still be able to use Hotel Center for data management tasks, such as uploading and editing property feeds or verifying transaction messages.

Why does it matter?

For marketers, understanding how Lodging Campaigns operate is crucial, as it is the sole method for managing hotel price ads and property promotion ads in the future. To avoid disruptions, taking proactive steps now is essential, as the ability to create subaccounts and manage bids in the Hotel Center will soon be discontinued.

What are Hotel price ads?

Marketers can utilize Hotel Price ads to promote their hotels on Bing.com across various devices. These advertising materials appear in front of travelers during their active search for hotel bookings, enhancing visibility for marketers.

What are Property promotion ads?

Property Promotion ads are visual advertisements positioned at the top of the Bing Maps hotel grid, triggered by location or amenity searches. Aimed at inspiring early-stage travelers, these ads provide advertisers an opportunity to influence the decision-making process.

Advantages of Lodging Campaign

A representative from Microsoft expressed enthusiasm about the opportunities presented by Lodging Campaign, including:

• Equal opportunities across platforms: Placement campaigns can simplify the management of hotel price ads and property promotion ads on both platforms. The updated campaign structure aligns it with the model and functionality of Google Ads Hotel campaigns.
• New options for ad distribution: This can enhance communication with a broader audience of travelers, reaching the audience of Microsoft ads and other search partners. The expansion may lead to increased interaction with your offers and more bookings.
• New targeting opportunities: Placement campaigns can contribute to increasing the volume and coverage of online sales by utilizing existing active remarketing lists from your Microsoft Advertising search campaigns.
• More control: This type of campaign gives you the ability to run separate campaigns for hotel price ads and property promotion ads.

Recommendations for marketers

To facilitate a seamless transition to the upcoming changes, Microsoft advises marketers to take the following steps:

1. Ensure that you’re existing subaccounts in the Hotel Center are replicated as placement campaigns.
2. Update URL tracking at the account or campaign level if necessary.
3. Retain the subaccounts in the Hotel Center for one to two weeks while the traffic for your placement campaigns builds up. You can also consider moderately increasing bids for Lodging Campaigns to boost volume.
4. Once the new campaigns gain sufficient traction, reduce the budget for the Hotel Center to a minimum ($0) and delete the subaccounts