Google Unveils Newest HPA Feature: The “Book Button” in Hotel Finder

Google’s Hotel Finder, one of the four search type options within Hotel Price Ads, just got a lot more…interesting. On December 3rd, Google unveiled the latest and greatest feature of HPA, the “Book Button” within Hotel Finder’s search results list. Google rolled out this new feature globally for desktop and tablet only.

Hotel Finder reuslts page with book button drop down:

Before this fancy new button was revealed, users had to first click on a hotel property from the Hotel Finder results page before they would be prompted to click on an advertised booking price.  With the “book button” users are prompted to book directly from the results page. As you might guess, this makes the HPA landscape even more competitive. The same two advertisers that were previously featured in the first two buttons or “top slots” on the property page are now featuered in the book button drop down as well.  So what happens if your advertised price isn’t quite competitive enough to make it into one of the two buttons on the property details page? Well, your price would be shown in the “more rates” drop down menu on the property page only if users forgo the new book buttons, go to the property details page and then click on the drop down menu for an advertiser in the menu. This makes the need to be in the top slots even more crutial.

Property details page:

So the question now becomes how will this change the way we mangage HPA campaigns? Will it change? It can certainly be surmised that we can expect signifigant increase in CPC’s and conversion rates as the competition heats up.  While this feature will certainly enchance and streamline the user experience, what affects can we as HPA managers expect to see from this? There is still a lot of data to be gained from this and questions to be answered, so stay tuned!