The Search Engine Journal just reported that 50.33% of searches on Google end up with no clickthroughs to websites because Google provides all the answers a user would need on the first results page itself. Google has become the "Librarian of the Universe" and has amassed more information than all libraries on planet Earth combined. Google has a singular objective: to provide answers - ultra-fast, relevant and straight to the point - to any question a human may have and, of course, make money in the process. With the advance of mobile and voice assistants, these answers happen more and more in the form of "Zero Click Searches" where the answer is provided right at the top of the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) and the user simply has no need to click and read further. With less than 5% of searches on Google resulting in clicks on paid search listings (Google Ads), does this mean the end of hotel paid search marketing?

Daniel E. Craig
Daniel E. Craig
Founder, Reknown

I think the zero-click issue largely pertains to simple queries that can be quickly answered on the search results page. Travel-related queries are more complex. The bigger issue is Google's dominance as the chief gatekeeper to online travel planning and how it favors its own products. In hotel searches, organic results have been driven further down the page. Google monetizes the top results in the form of pay-per-click ads and the hotel search box. The current system favors big players with deep pockets, but even Expedia and TripAdvisor are feeling the pain.

Also concerning is last year's revamp of Google My Business listings. Since Google can't monetize hotel websites, it effectively recreated them in the form of GMB listings and now diverts traffic to these listings instead of hotel websites. The key difference is that GMB pages often list virtually every booking channel but the hotel's direct channel. To appear here, hotels have to pay.

If anything, paid search marketing is becoming harder to avoid for hotels—and more expensive. Maybe that's fair. Hotels have had a free ride on Google for a long time and still do in many ways. 

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