Brand protection: Stop paying OTAs for your brand name!

You type your hotel’s name into Google… and Booking comes up first.

It’s frustrating, isn’t it? Your potential guest is looking for your hotel, types its name into Google… but clicks on a Booking advert that appears before your official website. And you’re the one indirectly paying for that click by paying the 20% commission. Welcome to the world of Google advertising targeting your own brand. It’s an ultra-aggressive strategy on the part of OTAs (Booking, Expedia, Hotels.com…), but one that can be countered.

Why do you have to pay to use your own brand name on Google?

Brand auctions: how they work

Online travel agencies (OTAs) have figured out exactly how to capture your traffic with minimal effort. They bid on your establishment’s name in Google Ads. The result:

• They appear at the top of search results for “your hotel’s name”

• Visitors think they’re clicking on your website, but are redirected to the OTA

• And if you want to appear above them? You have to pay more. For your own name.

What it really costs you

If you do nothing, you’ll end up paying between 15% and 25% commission on sales made by OTAs using your brand name. The worst part? These are potential customers who were already on board and intended to book with you.

If you set up a brand defence SEA campaign (paid search on Google), each click on your hotel’s name will cost between €0.15 and €1. And sometimes more if the OTAs are aggressive.

However, this is clearly profitable if done properly, as distribution costs are generally less than 5% (compared to OTA commission, which is at least 15%). It is a simple strategy to implement, offering a good return on investment by recouping the sales that OTAs take for themselves. Indeed, traffic linked to your brand name converts 3 to 5 times more effectively than traditional SEA campaigns.

SEA brand protection: how to regain control

Can we stop OTAs from doing this?

No, Google doesn’t ban it. But you can:

• Limit their room for manoeuvre

• Regain your visibility and sales

• And, above all, optimise your bidding strategy to regain the upper hand without blowing your budget

Our tips for protecting your name

• Make sure your brand name is actually being “targeted” (if you’re listed on an OTA or your establishment has been open for more than a year, this is highly likely)

• Create a Google Ads “Brand Defence” campaign: you need to appear first for your brand name.

• Use ad extensions: links to rooms, reviews, FAQs, exclusive offers

• If necessary, add a promo code visible only on your website or offer lower prices to encourage direct bookings on your site

Take control of your budget – don’t let it control you

Bidding on your name can be inexpensive… provided you have:

• High-quality listings (relevant, well-written, persuasive, optimised, etc.)

• An effective, fast and consistent landing page

• Accurate monitoring of your click-through rate, and therefore effective tracking of your website

• Make sure you have a simple and effective booking process, including on mobile, otherwise potential customers will always prefer to use a site like Booking

At Eliophot, this is truly an essential service that we offer and have mastered perfectly. It’s worth noting that this type of brand protection SEA campaign can even help you improve the return on other marketing investments.

Why Eliophot is the partner you need

Specialists in hotel advertising

At Eliophot, we are not a traditional generalist digital marketing agency; for years, we have specialised in the hospitality sector and premium lifestyle brands. We understand how OTAs work, booking cycles, the challenges you face, and the specificities of the hotel market.

Campaigns tailored to the nearest euro

• Every click is tracked, every conversion measured through the implementation of tracking

• We use clear dashboards to show you the return on every euro invested

• We monitor and adapt SEA campaigns to keep pace with algorithm changes and performance fluctuations

100% hospitality support

We build campaigns tailored to your establishment, your objectives and your seasonal patterns

We manage them in conjunction with your booking engine, not in isolation

What if you stopped funding your competitors?

You’ve invested in your brand, your image and your reputation.

Don’t let OTAs reap the rewards of that work.

For any hotelier, this is the essential first step to improving your website’s performance. At Eliophot, we help you regain control of your paid visibility, with every click.

👉 Chat with one of our experts and find out how much you could save as early as next month.

How Eliophot helps you enter the GEO era

We have already integrated these issues into our SEO services:

• We structure pages to appeal to both traditional and generative search engines,

• We train our copywriters in “SEO x AI” writing: concise, clear, user-oriented,

• We help to produce content that is localised, concrete and useful: activities around the site, customer journeys, specific experiences,

• We propose a netlinking strategy tailored to the specific needs of LLMs (e.g. ChatGPT),

• We configure Schema markup and other technical optimisations to maximise your visibility in enriched extracts and AI responses.
  

  How to integrate AI intelligently into a working method

What AI can do

• Save time in content production,

• Identify keyword opportunities,

• Structure articles, FAQs, SEO strategy,

• Optimise SEA and SMA campaigns, or even the technical aspects of your site.

What AI cannot yet do as well as a human in a 100% autonomous way

• Translate theemotional DNA of a hotel with the desired subtlety,

• Adjust a message to the unique positioning of the brand,

• Understand the reality on the ground of a customer journey that is unique to you,

• Write to sell an experience… not just a room.

AI is a tremendous performance driver, but it needs a lot of iteration and framing to get there. Similarly, AI still generates a lot of errors (“hallucinations”), which still requires human supervision.
Finally, AI is a tool, so it’s the talent of the people who use it that will make all the difference, hence the importance of working with experts.