Google recently announced that they are going forward with their plan to block third-party cookie tracking through Google Chrome (Chrome commands 63% of browser market share). What this means exactly for hotels is not totally clear. Mostly what will be affecting is tracking the source of revenue on a hotel's website (also called attribution) and the possibility to re-target visitors to your website (unless you use Google's retargeting ad products). To avoid users getting hit with totally irrelevant ads, like billboards on the highway, Google is creating a new system to target users which involves less tracking. Called FLoC the system essentially groups people into categories based on their behavior and puts a label on top so they can get served ads based on those labels without having any personal information connected. However, it only works if you advertise with Google, which means they are building a taller wall around their garden - an odd choice as they enter a long anti-trust investigation process. But what does this mean for hotel marketing? How will hotels track revenue? Since most non-major brand hotels have two domains (website + booking engine) how will this affect tracking?

There is two parts to the problem: a) how does a hotel ensure that their ads now hit the right target and b) as you rightly said, how is the tracking going to work at a hotel level but more specifically - how are vendors currently tracking that data will change their mechanism, if at all required?

Whilst its nothing new that google just gatecrashes parties and owns verticals once broken into (with travel being a major one i believe going forward) I find it highly interesting that google goes back to "segmentation" whilst always playing the "hyper personalization" card in all other areas.

On the other hand - how do most hotels really use that information anyhow? besides traffic, what are they and "are they" actually using those data points to make decisions? My educated guess is that most hotels will not even know the difference between before and after. 

.....and google wouldn't be google is something gets spun off it that hotels will embrace

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