For every guest who completes a direct booking on your hotel website, several more visit and leave without booking. They looked at rooms, checked dates, maybe started the booking process — and then stopped. They went back to browsing, got distracted, compared other options, or simply were not ready to commit.
These guests are not lost. They are warm. They have already shown interest in your property specifically. Display advertising — and in particular, retargeting — exists to bring them back.
Display advertising places visual ads (banner images, responsive ads, video) across websites, apps, and platforms outside of Google Search. When a guest visits your hotel website and leaves without booking, display retargeting follows them with your ads as they browse the wider web — news sites, weather apps, recipe platforms, sports results pages — keeping your property visible until they are ready to return and complete their booking.
Display advertising also serves a brand awareness function, reaching potential guests who have not yet visited your website but match the demographic and interest profile of your target guest. The two applications — retargeting and prospecting — require different strategies and should be measured differently.
Hotel booking decisions have a longer consideration cycle than most consumer purchases. A guest researching a city break may visit your website Monday, compare options Tuesday, check rates again Thursday, and book on the weekend. During that window, the guest is actively making a decision — and the hotel that stays visible has an advantage over one that disappears after the first visit.
Retargeting exploits this window. A guest who visited your rooms page on Monday and sees your display ad on Wednesday is reminded of their interest at a moment when the decision is still live. The ad does not need to work hard — it simply needs to keep your property in mind until the guest is ready to act.
The conversion rates on retargeting campaigns are significantly higher than on cold audience display campaigns. The cost per booking is lower. The return on ad spend is higher. For hotels with any meaningful website traffic, retargeting is one of the most commercially efficient advertising channels available.
Not all website visitors are equally valuable. Retargeting works best when audiences are segmented by the depth of interest they showed during their visit, and ads are tailored to each segment.
Homepage visitors: Guests who arrived on the homepage and did not visit any deeper pages showed minimal intent. They may have arrived from a broad search, a social media referral, or direct curiosity. Retargeting these visitors with a general brand awareness message keeps the property visible but should not be the primary focus of retargeting budget.
Rooms and rates visitors: Guests who visited room type pages or rate pages demonstrated active interest in staying. They evaluated what you offer. Retargeting these visitors with room-specific creative — the specific room category they viewed, if possible — is more relevant and converts at higher rates than generic retargeting.
Booking engine visitors: Guests who entered the booking engine and did not complete are the most valuable retargeting audience. They started the process. Something stopped them — price uncertainty, distraction, comparison research. Retargeting with a message that addresses common conversion barriers (flexible cancellation, best rate guarantee, direct booking benefits) can recover a meaningful proportion of these abandoned bookings.
Package and offer visitors: Guests who viewed specific packages — spa breaks, romantic getaways, family packages — can be retargeted with creative specific to that package. Relevance drives conversion.
Hotel retargeting audiences are built from website visitor data collected via Google Analytics 4 and the Google Ads tag. The setup process requires both to be installed and linked.
In GA4, create audience definitions based on the page visits and events that indicate purchase intent: users who visited a rooms page, users who reached the booking engine, users who abandoned a booking in progress. Export these audiences to Google Ads, where they become targeting lists for display and Performance Max campaigns.
Audience size matters for retargeting effectiveness. A hotel with 500 monthly website visitors will build retargeting audiences too small to serve meaningful impressions. A hotel with 5,000+ monthly visitors has sufficient audience depth for retargeting to produce reliable volume. If your website traffic is low, display retargeting should be a lower priority than channels that drive new traffic to the site.
Hotel display ads compete for attention in environments where the guest’s focus is elsewhere — reading an article, checking sports results, browsing social media. Effective hotel display creative does one thing well: create a moment of recognition or aspiration that prompts a click.
Responsive display ads: Google’s responsive display format accepts multiple headlines, descriptions, and images, then automatically assembles combinations to test performance across different placements. For most hotels, responsive display ads are the most practical format — they adapt to available ad sizes and require less creative production than fixed-format banner ads.
Image selection: Use hero images that show the property at its best — the view from a room, the pool, the restaurant, the lobby — rather than exterior building shots or generic stock photography. The image has a fraction of a second to create desire. Use images that show the experience of being there.
Headline and description: Retargeting creative should reference the guest’s prior visit implicitly — “Your stay at [Hotel Name] is waiting”, “You left before booking — rates are available”, “Complete your reservation” — without being intrusive. The message should feel like a helpful reminder, not surveillance.
HTML5 and animated formats: For higher-budget campaigns, animated HTML5 display ads — showing multiple room types, seasonal imagery, or dynamic rate information — can outperform static formats. These require design resource and are typically reserved for properties with significant display budgets.
Hotel display advertising can be executed through Google’s Display Network (GDN) via Google Ads, or through programmatic platforms (DV360, The Trade Desk, and others) that provide access to broader inventory and more sophisticated audience targeting.
For most independent hotels, Google Display Network via Google Ads is the appropriate starting point. It provides access to a vast inventory of websites and apps, integrates directly with Google Ads retargeting audiences, and requires no minimum spend commitment. The interface is familiar to anyone already running Google Search campaigns.
Programmatic display via DV360 or similar platforms offers more granular audience targeting, access to premium publisher inventory, and advanced frequency management. These advantages become material at higher budget levels — typically £5,000+ per month in display spend — where the incremental performance gains justify the additional complexity and often-higher minimum investment requirements.
Google’s Performance Max campaign format runs across Search, Display, YouTube, Gmail, and Maps from a single campaign. For retargeting, PMax campaigns using audience signals built from GA4 audiences can serve retargeting creative across the full Google ecosystem — not just the Display Network.
PMax retargeting is particularly effective for hotels because it reaches the same warm audience across multiple surfaces — search results, YouTube pre-roll, display placements — increasing the frequency and variety of touchpoints during the consideration window. The trade-off is reduced transparency: PMax campaigns do not report placements or audience breakdowns with the granularity of standard display campaigns.
Display retargeting should be measured on assisted conversions and view-through conversions, not just last-click attribution.
A guest who saw your retargeting ad three times and then returned directly to book will not show as a display conversion in last-click models — the direct channel gets credit. View-through conversion tracking in Google Ads attributes a booking to a display campaign if the guest saw (but did not click) an ad from that campaign within a defined window before booking.
View-through attribution inflates display conversion numbers and should be weighted carefully. A conservative approach: count view-through conversions at 20–30% of their face value when calculating ROAS, and prioritise click-through conversions for primary performance measurement.
Use GA4’s multi-touch attribution reports to understand where display fits in the full conversion path. If display consistently appears as a mid-funnel touchpoint — present in booking journeys that convert, even when another channel gets last-click credit — it is contributing value that last-click metrics undercount.
Retargeting everyone equally. Serving the same ad to homepage bouncers and booking engine abandoners is inefficient. Segment audiences by intent depth and allocate budget toward the highest-intent segments.
No frequency cap. Without frequency caps, retargeting campaigns can serve the same ad to the same person dozens of times — creating negative brand associations rather than positive recall. Set frequency caps of 3–5 impressions per user per day as a baseline.
Generic creative. A retargeting ad that looks like a banner from a chain hotel — stock photography, generic headline, brand logo — will not recover a guest who left without booking. Relevant, property-specific creative that reflects what the guest viewed is significantly more effective.
Not excluding past bookers. Retargeting campaigns should exclude guests who have already completed a booking. Serving retargeting ads to people who have just confirmed a reservation wastes budget and may create confusion.
The Lobby manages display retargeting and prospecting campaigns for independent hotels across Europe — building audiences, creative, and bidding strategies that recover abandoned bookings and extend reach to new guests.
The Lobby is a hospitality digital marketing agency working with independent hotels and restaurants across Europe. We combine paid media, SEO, and website strategy to grow direct revenue.
Talk to The Lobby about a paid media strategy built around your hotel’s direct booking goals.
