1.

SUMMARY

I got selected in a technology startup – FabHotels through Career Development and Guidance
Centre (CDGC) during the internship cycle in my 5th semester. FabHotels is a network of 3
star budget hotels in India with technology at its core. It has its headquarters in Gurugram. It
currently operates in more than 50+ cities of India with 500+ Hotels, including major cities
like Mumbai, New Delhi, Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, and Coimbatore. Its operations
began in 2014. FabHotels was founded in 2014 by Vaibhav Aggarwal, an alumnus of IIT
Guwahati and Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and Adarsh Manpuria, also
alumnus of Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. It has received a total of $43.1M
in funding so far including investors – Goldman Sachs, Accel Partners, Qualcomm Ventures.
My internship started in December ’18 and completed in June ’19. I was selected for the profile
of digital marketing but since it is a startup, I got to learn and work in many verticals including
Revenue and Online Travel Agencies (OTA). At the start of the internship, I was given
guidance on how the business works and what all areas I’ll be working on.

My first project was – “YouTube Influencers” which was given to my team by the CEO of the
company. In this project, I organized data of all the YouTube influencers in the country who
are popular in food, travel, fashion, lifestyle, vlogs etc. so that the company can enter into
partnerships with them to promote our brand. After successful completion of this project, I
worked in Search Engine Marketing (SEM) under the guidance of my mentor. He gave me all
the necessary training and guided me through my project. The project given to me was –
“Google Ads Optimization”. Google ads is the 2nd major source of revenue for the company
and I along with my mentor managed and optimized the complete account of google ads of
FabHotels. My major task was to optimize the cost and revenue and complete targets by using
insights from data and developing the marketing strategy. Apart from this, my other routine
job was maintenance of the account including hygiene check and all the operational work. The
overall scale and performance of the account significantly increased during the course of my 6
months of internship. I also completed professional certifications of google ads and google
analytics during my internship.

In the later part of my internship, I worked with different teams and learnt a lot of things while
understanding the business. Another major project was given to me by the OTA team that was
“Scaling Airbnb”. It was a new project and was a major challenge. I was given 15 properties
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across 7 cities for which I had to create and manage the Airbnb account. My major task was to
increase the business through this channel by generating room nights through Airbnb and
completing the targets. This project was a success.

I also learnt and worked on Google Hotels Ads, Facebook Ads, competitor analysis, CRM
(Customer Relationship Management) during the later phase of my internship. In all, I covered
all of digital marketing while coordinating with other teams.

The most important part of my work was data and analytics. Without organizing data and
generating meaningful insights from it, it would not have been possible to get results from the
work done. I particularly worked on marketing analytics where I collected data from various
tracking and measuring sources and then created meaningful insights from it. Using these
insights, I optimized the marketing campaigns and developed strategy. I worked on MS Excel,
Google Analytics, SQL, R etc.

Overall, I learnt a lot of things while working in FabHotels. Apart from the work done and the
learnings, I interacted with a lot of people in the company and formed a good professional
network. These interactions turned out quite useful during my internship and will surely be
useful in the future. By interning in a startup, I gained a lot of skills as I got complete ownership
of my work and the responsibility. The areas in which I worked have a lot of scope in the future
and have endless job opportunities. Digital marketing, specially has a lot of scope as more and
more people and businesses go digital. I am grateful for all the learnings and experience gained
during the internship as well as for the guidance of my industry mentor and faculty coordinator.

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 2. INTRODUCTION

2.1 Hospitality & Tourism Industry

With the growing economy, Indian hospitality industry has emerged as one of the key industries
driving growth of the services sector in India. It has evolved into an industry that is sensitive
to the needs and desires of people. The fortunes of the hospitality industry have always been
linked to the prospects of the tourism industry and tourism is the foremost demand driver of
the industry. The Indian hospitality industry has recorded healthy growth fuelled by robust
inflow of foreign tourists as well as increased tourist movement within the country and travel
of corporates also has a considerable share, thus it has become one of the leading players in
the global industry.

2.2 Industry Characteristics

The major characteristics of the Indian hospitality industry are:

2.2.1 High seasonality

The Indian hotel industry normally experiences high demand during October – April,
followed which the monsoon months entail low demand. Usually the December and
March quarters bring in 60% of the year’s turnover for India’s hoteliers. However, this
trend is seeing a change over the recent few years. Hotels have introduced various
offerings to improve performance (occupancy) during the lean months. These include
targeting the conferencing segment and offering lucrative packages during the
lean period.

2.2.2 Labour intensive

Quality of manpower is important in the hospitality industry. The industry provides
employment to skilled, semi-skilled, and unskilled labour directly and indirectly. Hotel
owners in India tend to “over - spec” their hotels, leading to higher manpower
requirement. With the entry of branded International hotels in the Indian industry across
different categories, Indian hotel companies need to become more manpower efficient
and reconsider their staffing requirements.

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2.3 Classification of hotels

The Ministry of Tourism has formulated a voluntary scheme for classification of operational
hotels into different categories, to provide contemporary standards of facilities and services at
hotels. Based on the approval from the Ministry of Tourism, hotels in India can divided into
two categories:

Classification of Hotels

DoT Classified Hotels DoT Unclassified Hotels

Fig. 2.1 – Classification of hotels

2.3.1 Classified hotels

Properties that can be classified based on the number of facilities and services provided by
them. Hotels classified under the Ministry of Tourism enjoy different kinds of benefits such as
tax incentives, interest subsidies, and import benefits. Due to lengthy and complex processes
for such classification, a significant portion of the hotels in India still remain unclassified. The
Ministry of Tourism classifies hotels as follows:

• Star category hotels

Within this category, hotels are classified as five-star deluxe, five-star, four-star, three-
star, two-star and one-star.

• Heritage hotels
These hotels operate from forts, palaces, castles, jungles, river lodges
heritage buildings. The categories within heritage classification include -
Heritage grand, heritage classic and heritage basic.

• Licensed units

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 Hotels/establishments, which have acquired approval/license from the Ministry
of Tourism to provide boarding and lodging facilities and are not classified as heritage
or star hotels, fall in this category. These include government-approved service
apartments, timesharing resorts, and bed and breakfast establishments.

• Branded players
This segment mainly represents the branded budget hotels in the country, which bridge
the gap between expensive luxury hotels and inexpensive lodges across the country.
Budget hotels are reasonably priced and offer limited luxury and decent services.
Increased demand and healthy occupancy have fuelled growth of budget hotels. These
hotels use various cost control measures to maintain lower average room rates without
compromising on service quality. Ginger Hotels, ITC Fortune and Ibis are some of the
popular budget hotels.

• Leased Hotels
In this arrangement the private owner of a hotel leases it to a corporation or chain. The
lessee is responsible for all the finances of the hotel. You, as the owner, may agree to
be paid a fixed rent. This represents the safest course. You might elect, however, to ask
for a share of the revenue. This involves some risk because if the hotel does poorly, you
will receive less money for its use. The lease method that contains the greatest risk is
for you to receive a share of the revenue after expenses. Many leases do have a
minimum payment, but you would have to decide which of these options, or a
combination of the options, you want to include in your lease contract.

2.3.2 Unclassified hotels

The small hotels, motels and lodges that are spread across the country. This segment is highly
unorganized and low prices are their unique selling points.

2.4 About the Company

FabHotels is a technology-driven 3-star budget hotel franchise brand. FabHotels currently
operate 10000+ rooms across 500+ franchise hotels in 50+ major cities across India. The

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headquarters are in Udyog Vihar, Gurugram, Delhi NCR and have teams across multiple cities
in India.

With technology at the centre of consumer experience and backend operations, FabHotels is a
budget hospitality brand, missing for so long in India. All Fab Franchise hotels follow rigorous
housekeeping procedures, undergo strict auditing processes, and have courteous trained staff
and to ensure a hassle-free experience every time during customer check in.

FabHotels is aiming to become India’s largest and most profitable hospitality brand in the next
18-24 months. There are 600+ members currently. The team at FabHotels comes from super
diverse backgrounds strategy consulting to private equity to consumer internet to ex-
entrepreneurs. Employees here are young, relentless and hungry.

The culture at FabHotels is very work friendly, the average age of the employees here is 26.
People are friendly and fun work environment with an open-door policy and approachable
management. The employees have a sense of ownership in them which is, what makes work
even more interesting?

Founded in 2014 Vaibhav Aggarwal, an alumnus of IIT Guwahati and Wharton School of the
University of Pennsylvania and Bain & Company and Adarsh Manpuria, also alumnus
of Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Why FabHotels? People used to face a huge problem finding a reliable, trustworthy and value
for money accommodation wherever they travelled, and unwillingly, ended up spending on
top-end hotels instead. This was a problem that a lot of our friends faced as well! Hence the
founders decided to do something about it, thus decided to launch their own brand of budget
hotels!

2.4.1 Objective:

The company has built its technology framework and operations with three core objectives.

• Delivering a superior return on investment to our franchise partners

• Providing consistent high-quality experiences for hotel guests
• Building a strong sustainable business for everyone involved
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2.4.2 Key Functions at FabHotels:

• Network Expansion
- Shape the footprint for the growth of our brand
- Identify, attract & onboard best quality hotels across India.

• Technology
- Uses data and technology to drive growth & margins
- Being a tech driven company, it believes in the optimum utilization of tech
resources for advanced and precise output.

• Revenue & Pricing

- Take ownership of region-wise P&L
- Empower management with impactful & effective analysis

• Business Development
- Geographical Mapping and Competitive Mapping for generation of Business
Leads
- Building Channels of Sales for deriving the leads.

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 Key Functions

Technology

Network Revenue & Business

Expansion Pricing Development

Fig. 2.2 – Key functions at FabHotels

2.4.3 Funding

FabHotels counts marquee investors such as Goldman Sachs and Accel Partners among its
backers. They raised a funding of $8 million from Accel Partners, RB Investments, Mohandas
Pai’s Aarin Capital and Qualcomm Ventures in 2016, and a funding of $25 million in a Series
B funding from Goldman Sachs & Accel Partners in 2017 that lead to accelerate nationwide
expansion. Recently, they raised a funding of $7.8 million from existing investors including
Goldman Sachs.

2.4.4 SWOT analysis

• Strengths:
o Exceptional hospitality services, delivering unforgettable experience.
o All properties are located in the prime locations that is near Airport, Central market
etc.
o SPOC
o Standardization & reliability
o Majority of young professionals, thus a freshness to the approach taken which is
one strong reason for its instant success.

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 • Weakness:
o Being a start-up company is still in development process.
o Hotels that are on a tie-up with FabHotels can also loop in other agents for which
FabHotels cannot do anything much to circumvent. In this context, the model
thrives solely on how well the margins they provide for their hotels are which can
be risky in the long run.

• Opportunities:
o Earlier the trend was more biased towards luxury and boutique hotels but not
anymore. People are trying to minimize spending and focus on saving and thus
budget hotels that can provide decent boarding and lodging facilities are on a high
demand today.
o The number of people who travel on business from both genders has grown
profusely in emerging economies. This has resulted in a demand for budget stays.

• Threats:
o New entrants are always the threat to any kind of business or industry as it can
acquire your share of market by its effective functioning.
o Another threat to the hotel is the threat from its competitors prevailing in the market
as there are various other budget which functions at their best. (eg: Oyo, Treebo)
o Another threat which is prevailing in the market is the various government policies
which are very dynamic in nature and can be changed in any period of time.

2.5 Digital Marketing

2.5.1 What is Digital Marketing

Digital marketing encompasses all marketing efforts that use an electronic device or the
internet. Businesses leverage digital channels such as search engines, social media, email, and
their websites to connect with current and prospective customers.

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It is. In fact, "constant" internet usage among adults increased by 5% in just the last three years,
according to Pew Research. And although we say it a lot, the way people shop and buy really
has changed along with it, meaning offline marketing isn't as effective as it used to be.

Marketing has always been about connecting with your audience in the right place and at the
right time. Today, that means you need to meet them where they are already spending time: on
the internet.

2.5.2 Digital Marketing Vs Traditional Marketing

Traditional Marketing is conventional mode of marketing that helps to reach out to a semi-
targeted audience with various offline advertising and promotional methods.

Though still effective, it’s not the only way to make your product popular among your target
market. Today, technology has grown and is enabling businesses to connect to their audience
like never before. Which is why industries have primarily shifting to Digital Marketing.

Digital marketing encompasses all marketing efforts that use an electronic device or the
internet. Businesses leverage digital channels such as search engines, social media, email, and
their websites to connect with current and prospective customers.

It is. In fact, "constant" internet usage among adults increased by 5% in just the last three years.
And although we say it a lot, the way people shop and buy really has changed along with it --
meaning offline marketing isn't as effective as it used to be.

Marketing has always been about connecting with your audience in the right place and at the
right time. Today, that means you need to meet them where they are already spending time: on
the internet.

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Fig. 2.3 – Digital vs traditional marketing

Fig. 2.4 – Percentage of world population on Facebook

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Fig. 2.5 – ROI of social media platforms

Fig. 2.6 – Drawbacks of traditional marketing

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Fig. 2.7 – Marketing funnel

Fig. 2.8 – Customer engagement

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Fig. 2.9 – Ease of marketing results

Fig. 2.10 – Bigger audience range of digital marketing

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2.5.3 Types of Digital Marketing

Search
Engine
Marketing

Search
Social Media
Engine
Marketing
Optimisation

Digital
Marketing

Affiliate Content
Marketing Marketing

Hotel Ads
Marketing

Fig. 2.11 – Main sectors of digital marketing

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

SEM refers to using paid advertising to get traffic from search engines. The most common
form of search engine marketing is probably Google Ads for the simple reason that Google is
by far the most used search engine.

In SEM the marketer usually pays the search engine a predefined amount of money for showing
a marketing message at various places within the search results for specified keywords or
phrases.

Similar to SEM other forms of PPC advertising also describe marketing methods where the
marketer pays for each click on a link to a website. Apart from search engines, almost all social
networks offer the opportunity for Pay Per Click advertising. These ads then appear in the feed
of the targeted social media users.

Note that many of these activities cannot be clearly separated. The lines between the various
types of digital (online) marketing are often blurred.

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Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO is the process of optimizing content or websites so that they show up in search results in
search engines like Google. Search engines decide which websites to show for a search term
based on keywords mentioned on the website and links that refer to this website. That means
SEO has a lot to do with using the right keywords or key phrases in the copy of a website or
within the content you want to show in organic search and getting links to this website or
content. Online businesses basically live at the mercy of Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other search
engines. If you are doing SEO right you can attract significant organic traffic to a website.

In this you advertise a product in search engines and make it appear among paid search results.
Search engines usually display paid results above organic results on SERPs. They almost look
the same as organic results with only small differences in appearance, for instance, Google
shows a small “Ad” label next to the related URL. On the screenshot below, you can see the
paid search results for the “web hosting” search query:

They allow you to buy ad space based on target keywords, location, viewer demographics, and
other data. Actually, search engine marketing is a pretty effective method, as search engines
only show your ad to the audience you want to target. In most cases, you need to pay for SEM
results according to the pay-per-click (PPC) advertising model, meaning you are only charged
when someone clicks your ad.

Social Media Marketing (SMM)

The Social Media has a strong focus on social media marketing. So that is where we are going
to start our list of types of digital marketing. Social Media certainly has a rightfully earned
place in this list.

Social Media Marketing is the use of social media platforms and websites to promote a product
or service. That means all sharing of information and engagement with followers, fans, partners
or competitors on social media platforms with the goal of promoting your products is part of
digital marketing. In essence, social media marketing is the targeted use of social media
conversations to increase awareness for a brand or product.

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But be careful, to be successful with social media marketing you have to fully understand the
one social network you want to use for your marketing. Each social network has unique
features, communication best practices, and content they like. Some social networks will work
great for your situation, product and content – others won’t.

Today, almost all digital marketing strategies utilize social marketing one way or the other.
And don’t worry, your social media strategy does not have to use ALL available social channels
or take a lot of manual action. Focusing on one or two social networks and adding marketing
automation to your activity will make it much more efficient.

If you want to promote a B2C business. Social media is not simply a marketing channel but
also a way for people to keep in touch with their friends and family, get the latest news, or
follow topics they are interested in. There is a plethora of social media platforms you can
choose from, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and many others. You need to
find the ones that are relevant to the niche you target and promote the business there.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a performance-based type of digital marketing. In contrast to PPC

advertising with affiliate marketing, the advertiser does not pay for traffic but rather for
conversions. The rates are usually higher but the risk on the side of the advertiser are limited
since he only pays for conversions.

Affiliate marketing is popular with bloggers and high-traffic website owners who make money
from selling other people’s products to their audience.

With affiliate marketing, you only pay for conversions, after your affiliate closed a deal and
the customer purchased the product. Affiliate marketers do all the related marketing activities
from banner placements to landing pages. Probably the best thing about affiliate marketing is
that it has no upfront cost and you can decide on the terms and rates you pay to the affiliates.

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2.6 Google Ads –SEM

2.6.1 What is Google Ads?

Google Ads is an online advertising tool that helps businesses connect with their customers.
You create your online ad, tell Google Ads who you want to reach, and Google Ads brings
your ads to them. That’s basically it.

Google Ads has a sophisticated targeting system that helps you show your ads to the right
people, in the right place, at the right time. Use keywords, location, demographics, and more
to target your campaigns.

Google Ads gives you complete control over your budget. You choose how much you spend
per month, per day, and per ad. There’s no minimum.

Google Ads shows you how many people see your ads, what percentage of them click to visit
your website, and even how many click to call you. With these tracking tools, you can even
see the actual sales your website is generating as a direct result of your ads.

If you want to change your strategy, you can tweak your ads, try new keywords, or pause your
campaign and re-start it whenever you’d like.

Fig. 2.12 – Paid search result (google ads) on google search

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 Account

Campaign1 Campaign2

Adgroup1 Adgroup2 Adgroup3 Adgroup4

Adset1 & Adset2 & Adset3 & Adset4 &

Keywords Keywords Keywords Keywords
Fig. 2.13 – Google ads account structure

2.6.2 Basic Terms

Google Ads: Definition

Google Ads is Google's online advertising programme. Through Google Ads, you can create
online ads to reach people at the exact moment when they're interested in the products and
services that you offer.

• Google Ads is a product that you can use to promote your business, help sell products
or services, raise awareness and increase traffic to your website.
• Google Ads accounts are managed online, so you can create and change your ad
campaign at any time, including your ad text, settings and budget.
• There's no minimum spending commitment, and you set and control your own budget.
You choose where your ad appears, set a budget that's comfortable for you and easily
measure the impact of your ad.
• An impression is counted each time your ad is shown on a search result page or other
site on the Google Network.
• Each time that your ad appears on Google or the Google Network, it's counted as one
impression.

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 • In some cases, only a section of your ad may be shown. For example, in Google Maps,
we may show only your business name and location or only your business name and
the first line of your ad text.

Campaign: Definition
A set of ad groups (ads, keywords and bids) that share a budget, location targeting and other
settings. Campaigns are often used to organise categories of products or services that you offer.
Your Google Ads account can have one or many ad campaigns running.

• Each campaign consists of one or more ad groups.

• Settings that you can edit at the campaign level include budget, language, location,
distribution for the Google Network and more.
• You can create separate ad campaigns to run ads in different locations or using different
budgets.

Ad group: Definition
An ad group contains one or more ads which target a shared set of keywords. You set a bid, or
price, to be used when an ad group's keywords trigger an ad to appear. This is called a cost-
per-click (CPC) bid. You can also set prices for individual keywords within the ad group. Use
ad groups to organise your ads by a common theme, such as the types of products or services
that you want to advertise.

Keywords: Definition
Words or phrases describing your product or service that you choose to help determine when
and where your ad can appear.

• The keywords that you choose are used to show your ads to people. Select high-quality,
relevant keywords for your ad campaign to help you reach only the most interested
people, who are more likely to become your customers.
• When someone searches on Google, your ad could be eligible to appear based on the
similarity of your keywords to the person's search terms. Keywords are also used to
match your ad to sites in the Google Network that are related to your keywords and ads.

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 • A great keyword list can help improve the performance of your ads and help you to
avoid higher prices. Poor keywords can ultimately cause you to have higher prices and
lower ad position.
• You can add match types to your keywords to help control which searches your ad can
be matched with.

Click: Definition
When someone clicks your ad, like on the blue headline of a text ad, Google Ads counts that
as a click.

• A click is counted even if the person doesn't reach your website, maybe because it's
temporarily unavailable. As a result, you might see a difference between the number of
clicks on your ad and the number of visits to your website.
• Clicks can help you understand how well your ad is appealing to people who see it.
Relevant, highly-targeted ads are more likely to receive clicks.
• In your account statistics, you'll see the click-through rate (CTR), which tells you how
many people who’ve seen your ad end up clicking it. This metric can help you gauge
how enticing your ad is and how closely it matches your keywords and other targeting
settings.
• Note that a good CTR is relative to what you're advertising and on which networks. To
help increase your clicks and CTR, start by creating great ad text and strong keywords
to make ads that are highly relevant and very compelling to your customers.

Destination URL: Definition

The URL address of the page in your website that people reach when they click your ad. The
domain of the destination URL needs to match the domain of your display URL. The
destination URL isn’t displayed on your ads (the URL shown is your display URL).

Display URL: Definition

The web page address that appears with your ad, typically shown in green text.

• Display URLs give people an idea of where they'll arrive after they've clicked an ad.
The landing page that you define with a Final URL tends to be more specific. For

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 example, if your Display URL is www.example.com, your Final URL might
be example.com/sweaters.
• For expanded text ads, your Display URL consists of the domain of your Final URL
(and the subdomain, if you have one) and your two optional “Path” fields of up to 15
characters each.
• In rare scenarios, your subdomain may not be added to your Display URL. For example,
if your subdomain uses a trademarked term, your Display URL may not include your
subdomain. Learn more about Google Ads trademark policy.

2.6.3 Business Optimization & Revenue

The following are the terms and techniques used in Search engine Marketing.

Daily budget: Definition

An amount that you set for each ad campaign to specify how much, on average, you'd like to
spend each day.

Maximum CPC bid: Definition

A bid that you set to determine the highest amount that you're willing to pay for a click on
your ad.

• If someone clicks your ad, that click won't cost you more than the maximum cost-per-
click bid (or "max. CPC") that you set. For example, if you set a Rs.25 max. CPC bid,
you'll never pay more than Rs.25 for each click on your ad. The actual amount that
you pay is called the actual CPC and is shown in your account's "Avg. CPC" column.

A higher bid generally helps your ad show in a higher ad position on the page.

You'll choose between manual bidding (you choose your bid amounts) and automatic
bidding (you set a target daily budget and the Google Ads system automatically adjusts your
max. CPC bids on your behalf, with the goal of getting you the most clicks possible within that
budget). With manual bidding, you'll set one maximum CPC bid for an entire ad group, but can
also set different bids for individual keywords.

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Manual CPC bidding
With Manual Cost-Per-Click (CPC) bidding, you can set a maximum price on the cost of
someone clicking your ads. You can get good value with this bidding method because you pay
only when a viewer is interested enough to click your ad and find out more.

CPC bidding campaigns, you set a maximum cost-per-click bid – or simply "Max. CPC" –
that's the highest amount that you're willing to pay for a click on your ad (unless you're
setting bid adjustments, or using Enhanced CPC).

Using Google tools to help you decide CPC bids

• Bid Simulator runs "what-if" scenarios such as, "How many more impressions would I
have had if my bid had been £0.10 higher last week?"
• Keyword Planner shows you how often some keywords are searched, and gives you
cost estimates at a glance.
• First-page bid estimates helps you to see how much you may need to bid to put your ad
on the first page of Google search results.
• Final amount you're charged for a click is called the actual CPC.
• Actual CPC is often less than Max. CPC because with the Google Ads auction, the most
you'll pay is what's minimally required to hold your ad position and any extensions
shown with your ad, such as site links. For example, if your Ad Rank places you
immediately above search results (e.g. in the fourth position) with location extensions
and site links, you’ll pay the minimum amount necessary to keep that position – and
meet the relevant thresholds tied to that position – with those extensions. You can learn
more about Ad Rank and actual CPC by watching the video below.

How a Max. CPC bid affects your Ad Rank

Your Ad Rank helps determine your ad's position among other ads on search results pages in
the Search Network. If you run your ads on the Display Network, Ad Rank plays the same key
role there. As Ad Rank is a score that's based on your Max. CPC bid and the quality of your ad
compared to other advertisers' ads, raising your Max. CPC will probably increase your ad's
chances of appearing

“Limited by budget” and provide budget recommendations:

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 • Your campaign is under-performing due to a limited budget.
• You’re using Maximise Clicks bidding and could increase traffic by adjusting your
budget.

Choose how you bid

AdWords gives you several ways to bid for your ads, depending on what matters most to you
and your business. For example, if you want to attract traffic to your website, then cost-per-
click bidding may be best. Learn about different bidding options to determine which one is best
for your business

Consider your goals

Each bid strategy is suited for different kinds of campaigns and advertising goals. For the
purposes of bidding, you'll want to consider four basic types of goals, along with your current
campaign settings.

• If you want customers to take a direct action on your site, and you're using conversion
tracking, then it may be best to focus on conversions. Smart Bidding lets you do that.
• If you want to generate traffic to your website, focusing on clicks could be ideal for
you. Cost-per-click (CPC) bidding may be right for your campaign.
• If you want to increase brand awareness – not drive traffic to your site – focusing on
impressions may be your strategy. You can use cost per thousand viewable impressions
(vCPM) bidding to put your message in front of customers. You can also use a Target
Search Page Location or Target Outranking Share strategy to maximise visibility.
• If you run video ads and want to increase views or interactions with your ads, you can
use cost per view (CPV) or CPM or cost-per-thousand (CPM) bidding.
• If you run video ads and your goal is to increase product or brand consideration, you
can use cost per view (CPV).

Focus on conversions with Smart Bidding

If you want to focus on conversions, consider using Smart Bidding to take much of the heavy
lifting and guesswork out of setting bids. Smart Bidding is a set of automated bid strategies
that uses machine learning to optimise for conversions or conversion value in each and every
auction – a feature known as “auction-time bidding”. It also factors in a wide range of auction-
time signals such as device, location, time of day, language and operating system to capture
the unique context of every search.

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Below are the four Smart Bidding strategies that you can use.

• Target CPA (cost per acquisition): If you want to optimise for conversions, you can use
Target CPA to help increase conversions while targeting a specific cost per acquisition
(CPA). Learn more About Target CPA bidding.
• Target ROAS (return-on-ad-spend): If you want to optimise for conversion value, you
can use Target ROAS to help increase conversion value while targeting a specific return
on ad spend (ROAS). Learn more About Target ROAS bidding.
• Maximise Conversions: If you want to optimise for conversions, but just want to spend
your entire budget instead of targeting a specific CPA, you can use Maximise
Conversions. Learn more About Maximise Conversions bidding.

• Enhanced cost per click (ECPC): If you want to automatically adjust your manual bids
to try to maximise conversions, you can use ECPC. It’s an optional feature that you can
use with Manual CPC bidding. Learn more About ECPC.

Focus on clicks with CPC bidding

If you're focusing on gaining clicks to generate traffic to your website, there are two cost-per-
click bid strategies to consider:

• Maximise Clicks: This is an automated bid strategy. It's the simplest way to bid for
clicks. All you have to do is set a daily budget, and the Google Ads system
automatically manages your bids to bring you the most clicks possible within your
budget. Learn more About Maximise Clicks bidding.
• Manual CPC bidding: This lets you manage your maximum CPC bids yourself. You
can set different bids for each ad group in your campaign, or for individual keywords
or placements. If you've found that certain keywords or placements are more profitable,
then you can use manual bidding to allocate more of your advertising budget to those
keywords or placements. Learn more About Manual CPC bidding.

Focus on impressions
If you want to focus on impressions, you can try one of the following bid strategies to help
maximise visibility.

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 • Target Search Page Location: This is an automated bid strategy that automatically sets
your bids to help increase the chances that your ads appear at the top of the page, or on
the first page of search results. Learn more About Target Search Page Location bidding.
• Target Outranking Share: This is an automated bid strategy that lets you choose a
domain that you want to outrank so that your ad is displayed above that domain’s ads,
or shows when that domain’s ad does not. You can set how often you want to outrank
that domain, and Google Ads automatically sets your Search bids to help meet that
target. Learn more About Target Outranking Share bidding.

• Cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM): With this bid strategy, you’ll pay based on the
number of impressions (times your ads are shown) that you receive on YouTube or
the Google Display Network.
• Cost-per-thousand viewable impressions (vCPM): This is a manual bidding strategy
that you can use if your ads are designed to increase awareness, but not necessarily
generate clicks or traffic. It lets you set the highest amount that you want to pay for
each 1,000 viewable ad impressions on the Google Display Network. vCPM bidding
probably isn't for you if the goal of your campaign is a direct response from customers,
like buying a product or filling in a form. Learn more About vCPM bidding.

Focus on views or interactions (for video ads only)

If you run video ads, you can use cost-per-view (CPV) bidding. With CPV bidding, you'll pay
for video views and other video interactions, such as clicks on the calls-to-action overlay
(CTAs), cards and companion banners. You just enter the highest price that you want to pay
for a view while setting up your TrueView video campaign. Learn more About CPV bidding.

About Manual CPC bidding

With Manual Cost-Per-Click (CPC) bidding, you can set a maximum price on the cost of
someone clicking your ads. You can get good value with this bidding method because you pay
only when a viewer is interested enough to click your ad and find out more.

Think about billboards: Advertisers pay for billboard space based on how many
people might see their ad as they drive by, whether those people actually notice the ad or not.

26
Internet ads are different: With Google Ads CPC bidding, you only pay for Google's "billboard
space" when you know that users have seen your ad and been motivated enough to click. If 100
people see your ad and three click it, you pay for the 3 clicks, not for the other 97 views.

How CPC bidding works

For CPC bidding campaigns, you set a maximum cost-per-click bid – or simply "Max. CPC" –
that's the highest amount that you're willing to pay for a click on your ad (unless you're
setting bid adjustments, or using Enhanced CPC).

Using Google tools to help you decide CPC bids

• Bid Simulator runs "what-if" scenarios such as, "How many more impressions would I
have had if my bid had been Rs.20 higher last week?"
• Keyword Planner shows you how often some keywords are searched, and gives you
cost estimates at a glance.
• First-page bid estimates helps you to see how much you may need to bid to put your ad
on the first page of Google search results.

Max. CPC bidding options

You can apply your Max. CPC bid in several ways. Let's say that you have a bakery, and you've
set up a "breakfast" ad group with keywords like bagels, croissants and teacakes. Here's how
you might set your bids:

If you want all the keywords in an ad group to have the same bid: Set an ad group default bid.
If you choose a Rs.30 CPC, then that's your Max. CPC when someone searches
for bagels, croissants or teacakes – any of your keywords. The same bid applies to placements
if you're running your ad on the Display Network. This is the easiest way to manage your CPCs.

If you want the keywords in an ad group to have different bids: Set keyword bids. For instance,
if you know that people who search for teacakes tend to buy more than people searching
for bagels, you might bid £1.25 for each click on teacakes and £1 for each click on bagels.

If you want your Display Network targeting methods to have different bids: You can set a Max.
CPC for placements, topics or other targeting methods. For instance, you can try to help your
ad show on a doughnut recipes website by setting a custom bid for that particular placement
on the Display Network.

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Quality Score: Definition
Quality score is an estimate of the quality of your ads, keywords and landing pages. Higher
quality ads can lead to lower prices and better ad positions.

• You can see your Quality Score (reported on a 1-10 scale) and its components (expected
click-through rate, ad relevance and landing page experience) in the "Keyword
Analysis" field of your account.
• The more relevant your ads and landing pages are to the user, the more likely it is that
you'll see higher Quality Scores.
• Quality Score is an aggregated estimate of your overall performance in ad auctions, and
is not used at auction time to determine Ad Rank.

Follow up on your Quality Score diagnosis

Pay attention to the “Big Three” component parts of ads quality: ad relevance, expected CTR
and landing page experience.

Relevance: Definition

How closely the elements of your ad campaign match what a person seems to be looking for.

• Your ads and keywords should directly relate to the content on your website, especially
the ad's landing page. When people see your ad, they should be able to understand what
kind of product, service or other content they'll find on your site.
• To encourage you to create relevant ad campaigns that accurately represent your
products or services, the Google Ads pricing system is partly based on relevance. A
highly relevant ad, keyword list and landing page is generally rewarded with a higher
position on the page for potentially less money.
• Relevance is part of your Quality Score, a formula that Google uses to measure how
useful your ad, keyword and website are to a customer. Relevant ads tend to get higher
Quality Scores.

Improve your ad quality

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Ad quality

User’s Device: Does Matter

In site experience is optimised for mobile, and if you haven’t already, try targeting users on
mobile devices with specific mobile-friendly ads and pages. Information is easy to find and
that navigation is intuitive for users on a mobile device.

Relevance to a User’s Intentions: Does Matter

rotate your ads to optimise for clicks. This allows Google Ads to consider the specific user and
query context of an auction, then deliver the right messaging for that moment. optimised ad
serving, you also want to give the system plenty of options for your ad text. Implement 3-5 ads
per ad group. The ad that ultimately serves in an auction will be one that's projected to be the
best for that situation. It’s a quick way to make your ads more relevant and better suited to a
user’s context.

Add as many ad extensions as possible. Set up all the extensions that make sense for you. Ad
Rank factors in the impact of those extensions. Extensions make your ads more prominent,
which generally translates to more clicks. Note that the quality of your ad extensions can impact
the overall increase in clicks that you receive.

Quality Score is only a guide in your account, impression share and average position should be
used as complementary metrics. Impression share is the sum of all auctions where your ad
showed and all auctions where your ad could be competitive enough to show. For example, it
could include auctions where your ad could show at twice its current bid, but could exclude
auctions where your ad is estimated to need a 1000% bid increase in order to appear. You might
understate your account’s potential if you look at impression share alone. Combine insights
from there with the Keyword Planner and bid simulators.

Average position also runs the risk of giving you an incomplete picture of how you’re doing
across auctions. When reviewing it, make sure that you review segment-specific performance.
Top vs. other and Google search partner site performance are particularly valuable to review.

29
 • Quality Score Shows you an estimate of how relevant your ads, keywords and landing
page are to a person who sees your ad. Higher Quality Scores typically lead to lower
costs and better ad positions.
• Landing Page Experience estimates how relevant and useful your landing page is to
people who click your ad. It takes into account factors such as how well your landing
page content matches a person’s search term, and how easy it is for people to navigate
your page.
• Exp. CTR Measures how likely it is that your ad will be clicked when shown. This
score is based on the past click-through performance of your ads. We exclude the effects
of ad position, and other factors that affect the visibility of your ad, such as extensions.
• Ad Relevance Measures how closely your keyword matches the message in your ads.
A below average score may mean that your ads are too general or specific to answer
the user’s query, or that this keyword isn’t relevant to your business.

Create very specific ad groups

Each ad group within your campaign should focus on a single product or service so that your
ads appear more relevant to customers.

Choose your keywords carefully

Include specific keywords that directly relate to the specific theme of your ad group and
landing page. It's often more effective to use keywords that are two or three words long
instead of just single words.

Include keywords in your ad text

Include your keywords in your ad text (especially in your ad's headline) to show people that
your ad is directly relevant to their search. When people see their search terms in your ad text.

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Strong call to action

Your ad text should have a strong call-to-action. A call-to-action encourages users to click your
ad and helps them understand what they can do once they reach your landing page. Here are
some sample call-to-action words: Buy, Sell, Order, Browse, Find, sign up, Try, Get a Quote.

Test out multiple ads

Experiment with different offers and call to action phrases to see what's most effective for your
advertising goals. Our system automatically rotates ads within an ad group and shows the
better-performing ad more often. Over time, you might see that certain ads will perform better
than others, thus showing you which ad text is more effective.

Increase traffic to my website

Focus on: clicks, click-through rate, keyword performance, search terms: Increase sales or
other types of conversions

Focus on: conversion data, destination URLs: I want to raise brand awareness
Focus on: impressions, customer engagement, reach and frequency

When a customer searches for a term that matches your keyword, your ad can enter an auction
to determine if it will show

The cost for each keyword will be different depending on the quality of your keyword, your
competition in the auction and other factors. Make sure that your keywords and landing page
are all closely related to the terms that a customer might be searching for or that would appear
on websites a customer would visit. To help you understand the quality for your keywords,
each keyword has a Quality Score.

This score is based on expected click-through rate, ad relevance and landing page experience.
Higher quality ads typically lead to lower costs and better ad positions

31
More about Keywords
Choosing match types for Search campaign keywords

When you add a keyword to ad groups for search campaigns, you can choose the match type
you want by entering the keyword in one of the following formats.

• For broad match, enter keywords with no formatting (for example, women’s hats)
• For broad match modifier, enter keywords with a + before the modified terms (for
example, +women's +hats)
• For phrase match, enter keywords in quotations (for example, "women's hats")
• For exact match, enter keywords in brackets (for example, [women's hats])

Broad match

Broad match is the default match type that all your keywords are assigned. Ads may
show on searches that include misspellings, synonyms, related searches and other
relevant variations. So, if your keyword is “women’s hats”, someone searching for “buy
ladies hats” might see your ad.

Negative keywords

Excludes your ads from showing on searches with that term. So, if you’re a hat company
that doesn’t sell baseball hats, you could add a negative keyword, designated with a
minus sign (-baseball hats).

Broad match modifier

Similar to broad match, except that the broad match modifier option only shows ads in
searches including the words designated with a plus sign (+women’s hats) or close
variations of them.

Phrase match

Ads may show on searches that match a phrase, or are close variations of that phrase,
with additional words before or after. Ads won't show, however, if a word is added to
the middle of the phrase, or if words in the phrase are reordered in any way. Designated
with quotation marks ("women's hats").

32
Exact match

Ads may show on searches that match the exact term or are close variations of that
exact term. Close variants include searches for keywords with the same meaning as the
exact keywords, regardless of spelling or grammar differences between the query and
the keyword. Close variations here may also include a reordering of words if it doesn’t
change the meaning, and the addition or removal of function words (prepositions,
conjunctions, articles and other words that don’t impact the intent of a search), implied
words, synonyms and paraphrases and words that have the same search intent.
Designated with brackets, the keyword [women's hats] could show when someone
searches on Google for “hats for women”

Match Special Example Ads may show on searches that Example

type symbol keyword contain: searches
Broad none women's Misspellings, synonyms, related buy ladies
match hats searches and other relevant hats
variations.
women’s
clothing
Broad +keyword +women’s All the terms designated with a + women’s
match +hats sign (or close variations of those scarves and
modifier terms) in any order. Additional hats
words may appear before, after or
winter hats
between the terms.
for women
Phrase “keyword” “women’s Matches of the phrase (or close blue
match hats” variations of the phrase) with women’s
additional words before or after. hats

buy
women’s
hats

women’s
hats on sale

33
 Exact [keyword] [women’s Exact matches of the term or close women’s
match hats] variations of that exact term with hats
the same meaning.
ladies hats

hats for
women

hats women
Table 2.1 – Different keyword types

How a keyword is selected

If your ad group has several keywords that could match a search term, the preferences below
are used to determine which keyword is used to enter an ad into an auction. The preferences
rank approximately in the order listed.

• A keyword that’s identical to the search term

If you have a keyword that is identical to the search term, this keyword is preferred for
triggering an ad. This is true even if there are other keywords in your ad group that are
similar to the search term.

• An exact match keyword when the keywords are identical

If you have multiple keywords that are the same, the exact match keyword is preferred for
triggering an ad.

• The keyword that has the highest Ad Rank

When several keywords in your ad group match a search term, the keyword with the
highest Ad Rank is preferred for triggering an ad.

• Example

If you have multiple ad groups with identical keywords, the exact match keyword is preferred
for triggering an ad

34
How to exclude searches

To prevent your ad from showing for particular searches, you can also add negative keywords.

Negative keywords can help you reduce costs by making sure that your ad shows just to the
audience you want

Where your ads appear

You can choose to target your ads to a number of different ad networks. Keywords work a bit
differently on each network:

• Google search and search partner sites: When you build your ad groups, you select
keywords relevant to the terms people use when they search, so your ads reach
customers precisely when they're looking for what you offer.
• Google Display Network: If you've chosen to show ads on Display Network sites,
Google Ads uses your keywords to place your ads next to content that matches your
ads. Google's technology scans the content and web address of a web page and
automatically displays ads with keywords that closely match the subject or web address
of the page. For example, on a web page that includes brownie recipes, Google Ads
might show ads about chocolate brownies or delicious dessert recipes. Learn how to
choose your keywords for Display Network campaigns.
• Google Play: When promoting your mobile app, pick keywords that are related to the
ways people look for apps. Add all of the keywords that you imagine people might use.
Keep in mind that Google may extend the scope of some of your keyword match types
in ways that are specific to apps. For example, adding the word "app" when advertising
outside of the Play network.

35
Types of keyword statuses

Below are the different status types:

Status type Examples:

Statuses that you control Campaign paused; Removed
Statuses related to where your Eligible
keyword is in our approval process
Statuses that are impacted on by Low search volume; Below first page bid estimate
other factors
Below first page Keyword is active and can show Find out about getting your ad to
bid estimate ads. However, your keyword isn't show on the first page of Google
currently showing ads on the first search results.
page of Google search results.
Disapproved Keyword is inactive and isn't Hover over the status bubble for
showing ads. A disapproved more details and review
keyword usually means that our advertising policies to see
there's an issue with one or more whether your keyword violates
of our advertising policies, such one of our policies.
as our destination or final URL
policy. Guide me in my account to fix a
disapproved ad.
Low search Keyword isn't eligible to show If the number of searches for these
volume because it's associated with very keywords increases, your
little search traffic on our keywords may be reactivated and
properties. This means that your could start triggering your ads to
keyword might not be relevant to show again. Find out how to use
people's searches, or maybe it's Keyword Planner to get keyword
too specific or unusual. ideas and traffic estimates.
Rarely shown Keyword isn't eligible to show You should consider removing
due to low ads due to a low Quality Score. this keyword and adding a more
quality score relevant keyword to your account.
Other factors, such as your landing
page, could also affect your

36
 Quality Score. Find out more
about Quality Score.
Few page The keyword is temporarily
matches suspended because it matches
very few pages, indicating that
the phrase isn't common in
Display Network content.
. Table 2.2 – Different keyword status types

Types of ADs
Expanded text ads?

Expanded text ads differ from standard text ads in a few important ways. They have:

• Two headline fields (up to 30 characters each)

• One longer description (up to 80 characters)

[Grab your
Luxury reader’s
River Cruiseattention
Holidays – Book
with a greatYour
quote from Today
Getaway
the document or use this space to emphasize a key
point. To place this text box anywhere on the page,
www.example.com/Cruises
just drag it.]

Explore the world along rivers. Selected locations on sale!

Fig. 2.14 - Expanded text ad (ETA)

Make the most of expanded text ads

Expanded text ads share a number of the best practices that you’re already familiar with for
standard text ads. But with almost 50% more ad text available and an extra headline, expanded

37
text ads provide more opportunity for you to connect with potential customers and drive more
qualified clicks to your website.

• Rethink the messaging of your ad. It can be tempting, but don’t simply add a second
headline to your existing ads. Consider the entire message that you want to present,
taking into account all parts of your new ad.
• Take advantage of your character limits. Expanded headline fields increase the
clickable space of your ads, and allow you to communicate more with someone who’s
searching before they decide whether to click through to your website.
• Focus on optimising your headlines. People are most likely to read the headline of your
ad. When viewed on the search results page, your ad’s headline fields are combined
using a hyphen, “-”. On mobile devices, the headline may wrap beyond the first line.
Consider the different ways in which your headline may display when writing your ad
to make sure that your ad is compelling and easy to read on different devices.

Responsive search ads (beta)

Responsive search ads let you create an ad that adapts to show more text—and more relevant
messages—to your customers. Enter multiple headlines and descriptions when creating a
responsive search ad, and over time, Google Ads will automatically test different combinations
and learn which combinations perform best. By adapting your ad’s content to more closely
match potential customers’ search terms, responsive search ads may improve your campaign’s
performance.

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Fig. 2.15 – Responsive search ad

Benefits

Responsive search ads can help you:

• Create flexible ads that adapt to device widths, giving you more room to share your
message with potential customers.
• Save time by providing multiple headlines and description options, then let Google Ads
show the most relevant combinations to your customers.
• Reach more potential customers with multiple headlines and descriptions options that
give your ads the opportunity to compete in more auctions and match more queries.
• Increase ad group performance by attracting more clicks and conversions that your
existing text ads aren’t capturing because responsive search ads help you compete in
more auctions.

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How it works

The more headlines and descriptions you enter, the more opportunities Google Ads has to serve
ads that more closely match your potential customers’ search queries, which can improve your
ad performance.

After you enter headlines and descriptions, Google Ads assembles the text into multiple ad
combinations in a way that avoids redundancy, different from expanded text ads, you can
provide up to 15 headlines and 4 descriptions for a single responsive search ad. Next, in any
given ad, a maximum of 3 headlines and 2 descriptions will be selected to show in different
combinations and orders. Over time, Google Ads will test the most promising ad combinations,
and learn which combinations are the most relevant for different queries.

Ad audience in Smart campaigns

Your ad audience determines where your ad can appear, as well as what types of searches will
cause your ad to appear.

Choosing the right ad audience can help you reach the right customers for your business.

Geographic targeting (where your ad can appear)

Google Ads uses the following methods to determine the geographic locations where your ads
can appear:

• Targeted locations: Your ads can appear for people who are located within the
geographic area that you've chosen to target. You can contact the Support team to
request that your ads show only in your targeted locations.
• Names of locations in searches: Some of your potential customers aren't located within
your targeted area, but they might include words related to your location in their
searches, such as postcodes or the names of nearby cities. If they show interest in
businesses like yours in your geographic area, your ads may be shown to customers
outside of your targeted area

40
2.6.4 Tracking the Performance

Google Analytics and Google Ads

Google Analytics is a powerful tool that keeps track of all the traffic that comes to a website.
You can use it with Google Ads to see how much of your website traffic or sales is coming
from your ads. Learn more about using Google Analytics and Google Ads together.

Link Google Analytics and Google Ads accounts

Linking a Google Analytics property to your Google Ads account can help you to analyse
customer activity on your website after an ad click or impression.

Before you start

To link Google Ads and Google Analytics, you’ll need administrative access to a Google Ads
account and “Edit permissions” to a Google Analytics account. For unlinking and editing an
existing link from Google Ads, only administrative access to a Google Ads account is required

How it works

To see Google Analytics data in Google Ads, you’ll first need to enable auto-tagging for your
Google Ads account, link your Google Ads and Google Analytics accounts and choose Google
Analytics views to import site metrics from. Then, you’ll add Google Analytics columns to
your Google Ads reports.

By viewing these Google Analytics site engagement metrics alongside your Google Ads
performance stats, you can see what people do after clicking your ad and reaching your landing
page. Here's the kind of data that you can see:

• Bounce rate: When someone sees only one page or triggers only one event, Analytics
considers this a "bounce". Your site's bounce rate is the percentage of sessions that are
bounces.
• Avg. session duration (seconds): The average time that someone stayed on your site.
• Pages/session: The average number of pages viewed per session.
• % new sessions: The estimated percentage of first-time sessions.

41
This information helps to show you how effective your campaigns and ad groups are. And that
in turn helps you make decisions about your budgets, bids, landing pages and ad text.

For example, viewing an ad group's bounce rate alongside its click-through rate (CTR) can
give you a sense of whether your customers are seeing what they expect on your site after
clicking on your ad.

Use Google Analytics

If you already have the Google Analytics tag installed on your website, you can follow these
steps to ensure that your Google Ads conversion tracking continues to measure conversions
accurately. If you have followed the instructions in Before you begin, the GCLID for an ad
click will be stored in a Google Analytics cookie on your site’s domain. If you’ve set up your
accounts and tag correctly, the Google Ads conversion tracking tag will be able to use the
GCLID from the Google Analytics cookie.

To use this method of tracking website conversions, follow the instructions in 'Before you
begin', then follow these additional guidelines:

• Don’t manually remove the JavaScript code from the conversion tracking tag for
a 'pixel-only' implementation.
• Link your active Google Analytics property to the Google Ads account that owns your
website conversion actions.

If you follow these steps, the GCLID from the Google Analytics cookie will automatically be
read. If you don’t want Google Analytics to store the GCLID in this cookie, follow the
instructions in How to opt out below.

Note that the Google Analytics cookie only stores the GCLID for the last click. If there are
multiple Google Ads accounts driving traffic to your website and you are currently not
using cross-account conversion tracking, this can lead to lower conversion numbers.

42
How to opt out

To opt out of using the Google Analytics cookie to store the GCLID, follow these instructions
to update your Google Analytics tag. It's not recommended to do this as it will lead to less
accurate conversion measurement.

Cross-domain conversion tracking

If you want to measure activity across multiple domains, such as when your landing page
domain is different from your conversion domain, you can enable cross-domain tracking by
adding the following to your website code (sample only – this code won't work on your
website):

gtag('set', 'linker', {
'domains': ['landing-destination.com', 'conversion-destination.com']
});

When Google Ads can’t observe all conversions

If you don’t implement one of the preceding solutions, it will limit your ability to measure
conversions. Even if you use one of the options above, there may still be times when
conversions can’t be measured. For example, when a user views a video ad in the YouTube
mobile app and later converts in the mobile browser, but hasn't signed into Google services on
either. In either case, Google will include modelled conversions in the 'Conversions' column in
your reports as estimates. Aggregated and anonymised data from users who have previously
signed into Google services are used to create modelled conversions.

Impact on bidding

It's recommended that you monitor your conversion reports over the next few months and
consider making any necessary changes to your bids. If you’re using Target CPA or Target
ROAS Smart Bidding strategies and you notice a decrease in traffic, you may want to adjust
your targets during this time to compensate for the underreported conversions. If you’re setting
bids manually, bear in mind that some conversions might not be reported when you’re
evaluating performance and adjusting bids.

43
Site-wide tagging and the legacy remarketing tag

You should be able to use one of the options above to ensure that Google Ads can measure all
of your conversions, regardless of the browser that your site visitor is using. In order to cover
some gaps, you may have in tagging, the Google Ads legacy remarketing tag still sets new
cookies on your domain that store information about the ad clicks that bring people to your
website. The cookies receive the ad click information from a GCLID ('Google click identifier')
parameter that's included in the conversion tracking tag.

For this method to work, make sure that you follow the instructions in the 'Before you begin'
section above, then deploy the remarketing tag on every page of your website.

How to opt out

If you don’t want the remarketing tag to set first-party cookies on your site’s domain, add the
following line to the tag configuration before you load the script tag:

var google_conversion_linker = false;

If you’re using conversion_async.js, add the highlighted portion below to the

google_trackConversion call:

window.google_trackConversion( { google_conversion_linker : false } );

Informing your site visitors about data collection

As always, please ensure that you're providing users with clear and comprehensive information
about the data that you collect on your websites, and getting consent for that collection where
legally required.

Note: If you haven’t implemented one of the options above and you have the legacy
remarketing tag on your website, it will set new cookies on your domain that store information
about the ad clicks that bring people to your website. For more information on this or to find
instructions on how to opt out, take a look at the Help Centre information about remarketing
tags.

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Conversion windows

A conversion window is the period of time after a customer clicks on your ad during which
a conversion, such as a purchase, is recorded in Google Ads.

In Google Ads, you can edit the conversion window setting for any of the web page, import,
in-app action or phone call conversions you're tracking.

Benefits

The conversion window setting is ideal for businesses that want more control when measuring
their conversions – particularly businesses that sell products with a buying cycle that doesn’t
fit the default 30-day conversion window. If you set a longer conversion window, you'll also
be able to see keywords early in the path to a conversion in Attribution reports.

Ad Extensions

Extensions expand your ad with additional information—giving people more reasons to choose
your business. They typically increase an ad's click-through-rate by several percentage points.
Extension formats include call buttons, location information, links to specific parts of your
website, additional text, and more.

Fig. 2.16 – Ad extensions

45
For greater visibility and prominence on the search results page. That means you tend to
get more value from your ad. Extensions often increase your total number of clicks, and can
give people additional, interactive ways of reaching you—as with maps or calls.

Select extensions based on your goal

Goal: Get customers to convert on your website

If you want to direct people to your website, use these extensions:

Site link extensions

To add more links to your ads, create sitelink extensions. Sitelinks can take people to specific
pages on your site—your store hours, a specific product, or more. When someone clicks or taps
on your links, they skip right to what they want to know or buy.

Callout extensions

Add additional text to your ad, like “free delivery” or “24/7 customer support.”

Call out extensions, you can promote unique offers to shoppers, like free shipping or 24-hour
customer service. When customers see your ads, they get detailed information about your
business, products, and services. This article gives an overview of callout extension.

Structured snippet extensions

Showcase information potential customers will find most valuable by selecting a predefined
header (like, product or service category) and listing items.

Price extensions

Showcase your services or product categories with their prices, so that people can browse your
products right from your ad.

Price extensions can add more value to your Search Network text ads by giving you a bigger
showcase for your services and range of products, and by linking people directly to what
interests them on your site.

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Price extensions appear below your text ad on desktop and mobile, and give you more space to
tell people details about what your business offers. They show as a set of up to 8 cards that
people can view to see different options and prices. From your price menu, people can go
directly to the item that interests them on your site.

Promotion extensions

Promotion extensions can add more value to your Search Network text ads by highlighting
your sales and promotions for people that are searching for the best deals your business has to
offer. This article explains the benefits of promotion extensions and how they show with your
search ads.

2.7 Facebook Ads

In Social Media Marketing. There are options you set at the campaign level reflect a concrete
business goal. The business goal you want the ad to drive is your ad objective. This might be
Brand Awareness or Catalogue Sales. Every ad set or ad within a single campaign will share
the same ad objective. Ad sets exist a level below campaigns, and contain ads. Options you set
at the ad set level reflect your priorities around delivery, such as:

• Target audience
• Placements
• Budget
• Schedule

At the ad level, you'll choose the ad format and provide the creative and copy that people see
on Facebook.

This includes your ad's headline, content, photo or video assets, and destination URL.

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 Fig. 2.17 – Facebook ads
Campaigns: Define your ad objective
Facebook simplifies ad creation and delivery by selling ads based on ad objectives at the
campaign level. Selecting an objective sets the business goal you want the ads within this
campaign to accomplish. This helps Facebook determine the best ad placements, formats, and
calls to action — and deliver your messages to the right people.

Facebook offers two awareness objectives:

• Select Brand awareness to display your ad to people most likely to be interested in your
product or service.
• The Reach objective shows your ad to the maximum number of people.

Consideration is the middle stage of the consumer journey, when people are aware or your
brand, but not yet ready to make a purchase.

• The Traffic objective drives people to a website, app or Messenger.

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 • Engagement ads are intended to increase post engagement, Page likes, or event
responses.
• If you’d like people to install your mobile or desktop app, try the App installs objective.
• The Video views objective shows your content to people who are most likely to watch
it.
• Lead generation ads encourage people to share their contact details via a mobile-
friendly form.
• The Messages objectives encourages people to have conversations with your business
in Messenger to complete purchases, answer questions, or offer support.

Conversion ad objectives drive action — such as a purchase or donation.

• Ads using the Conversions objective ask people to do something in a website or app.
install the Facebook pixel to a website or SDK to an app to track actions people take,
and to create audiences and optimize ad delivery based on those actions.
• The catalogue sales objective is ideal for ecommerce, travel, auto, and real estate
companies: You can link to images of every item you sell, and Facebook will display
different items to different people, based on broad targeting criteria or how they've
engaged with ads in the past.
• The Store visits objective encourages people to visit your brick-and-mortar locations.

At the ad set level, advertisers set delivery preferences by defining the audience, choosing
placements, and establishing a schedule and budget.

Specify an audience
Facebook allows advertisers to target different audience types.

• New audiences you create manually within an ad set are called Core Audiences. Their
targeting options include location, gender, age, language, interests, and behaviours. Use
them to target ads using Facebook data.
• Custom Audiences let you securely input your customer data — or leverage Facebook
engagement data — to reach people you already have a relationship with, such as people
who’ve visited your website, provided their contact details, or liked your Facebook
Page.

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 • Lookalike Audiences find people with similar characteristics to people who’ve engaged
with your ads or Page by combining Custom Audiences or Saved Audiences with
Facebook data.

Select placements

Your ads can appear on multiple platforms across the Facebook family of apps and services.
The placements available to you may vary depending on which ad objective you selected, but
will include at least one of the following:

• Facebook ads can appear in News Feeds, Instant Articles, In-stream Video, Stories,
Suggested Videos, Marketplace, and in the Right Column on desktop.
• Instagram ads can appear in Feeds and Stories. (Note that if you select “Instagram
Stories” as a placement, that ad won’t run anywhere else.)
• Audience Network extends your ads to other app and website publishers, in a range of
placement types including native, banner, interstitial, in-stream video, and rewarded
video.
• Messenger ads can drive re-engagement and scaled communication. They may appear
in the Messenger home screen or may be sponsored messages.

Choose a budget and schedule

Set a daily or lifetime ad budget, and set start/end dates for the ad set. Ads Manager will tell
you how many people are likely to see your ad (estimated reach) based on the budget you
select.

Note that optimization options and when you get charged may vary based on the campaign
objective and placements you’ve selected.

Explore Blueprint courses on setting budgets and understanding Facebook’s ad auction:

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Ads: Get creative

At the ad level, select the ad format and connect the ad to a Facebook Page or Instagram account
that you manage. Give the ad an intuitive name to easily find and evaluate it within Ads
Manager and in reporting.

Formats

Your ad objective and placement can impact which formats are available. Generally, they are:

• Carousel: a scrollable sequence of 2-10 images or videos

• Image: a single photo or graphic
• Video: an ad anchored by a single video
• Slideshow: a looping video ad composed of up to 10 images and/or frames extracted
from a video to which you can add transitions and music
• Collection: a visual and immersive way to promote your business or products

Ad formats

Photo

Photo ads offer a clean, simple format to feature engaging imagery and copy. Convey who you
are and what you do through high-quality images or illustrations.

Video

Tell your story with sight, sound and motion. Video ads come in a range of lengths and styles
– from short, feed-based ads that you watch on the go, to longer videos that you watch on the
sofa.

Stories

Stories are a customisable, edge-to-edge experience that lets you immerse people in your
content. Tap into their passions and inspire them to take action on mobile.

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Messenger

Messenger ads help people start conversations with your business. Get personal with current
or potential customers and add interactive or automated features.

Carousel

Carousel ads let you showcase up to ten images or videos in a single ad, each with its own link.
Highlight different products or tell a brand story that develops across each card.

Slideshow

Slideshow ads are video-like ads made of motion, sound and text. These lightweight clips help
you tell your story beautifully across devices and connection speeds.

2.8 Online Travel Agencies (OTA)

OTA Acronym for Online Travel Agency is a website or online service, which sells travel
related products to customers. These products may include hotels, flights, travel packages,
activities and car rentals. Crucially, OTAs are third parties, reselling these services on behalf
of other companies, including those in the hotel industry.

Typically, an OTA will offer many of the benefits of using an offline travel agency, with added
convenience and more of a self-service approach. They will also include a built-in booking
system, allowing for instant bookings.

Some agencies sell a variety of travel products including flights, hotels, car rentals, cruises,
activities, and packages. Other agencies, such as Viator, GetYourGuide, BeMyGuest, and
others specialize in the sale of tours and activities. In all cases, the travel agency has an agency
agreement with tour or activity providers to resell their products where the agency takes
payment from the consumer and pays net rates to the provider.

In the case of agencies that sell tours and activities, the consumer is issued a voucher which
they must present to the tour or activity provider in order to redeem the

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service. This voucher may be paper based or electronic in the form of a mobile QR code. Once
redeemed, the provider invoices the agency and receives a payment for the services rendered.

With the increasing trend in hotel industry, the role of an online travel agency, or OTA for
short, has become increasingly important within the hotel industry, because they provide a
convenient way for customers to compare hotels and to book them over the internet, from the
comfort of their own home, or on the go.

2.8.1 Why Are OTA Important?

Online travel agents are increasingly important for hotels, because they serve as both a
marketing and a distribution channel. A growing number of potential guests now turn to OTAs
to search for their hotels, because they function as a kind of ‘one stop shop’, allowing them to
easily search for hotels, read reviews, and compare prices.

In addition, hotels that are listed on online travel agent websites can also benefit from what is
sometimes referred to as the ‘billboard effect’. This refers to the fact that OTAs can provide a
form of advertising, making their users aware of the hotel chain on their platform. After gaining
this awareness, users may then decide to research a hotel and perhaps even go on to make a
direct booking through the hotel website.

Online travel agencies, or OTAs, originated as a way to sell off excess inventory when demand
was slow. Today, OTAs drive the majority of global, online bookings.

The biggest OTAs have developed trusted brands which consumers recognise instantly. They
now have the ability to compare travel options alongside each other in terms of price, time and
location.

Choosing the right OTA for your business model can be confusing, as there are now so many,
with differing commission levels and target markets. In this article I will guide you through
what to look for in an OTA and how to find the ones which are aligned with your business
model.

OTAs provide resources simply unavailable to most hoteliers. Many view OTAs as distribution
channels, but they offer more than extended reach. OTAs create culturally appropriate online

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experiences. This includes currency conversions, language support, and tailored experiences
based on purchasing habits. OTAs offer hoteliers access to non-brand loyal travellers, younger
travellers, and the packaged traveller. Hotel loyalty members only make up 43% of the total
US adult leisure traveller market. Thus, there is a large opportunity for OTAs to work for the
smaller hotelier (source).

Why people Use OTAs

Online travel agencies offer consumers a versatile experience. Not only can they show the
multitude of travel options, but also offer trusted reviews and accurate local information. OTAs
have created their own brands that consumers trust and recognize as thought-leaders. Hoteliers
leverage OTA’s brand when they list their property with them. For example, Lonely Planet
reviews each of their properties individually. Guests trust their expert, first-hand opinion. Or,
travel sites such as Expedia guarantee low pricing and travellers know they are getting the best
deal.

OTAs offer hoteliers and consumers much more than a distribution channel. Sites such as
Expedia and TripAdvisor are often consumer’s first stop when researching travel plans. They
can offer value to consumers at all stages of the buying process: problem recognition,
information search, evaluation of alternatives, purchase decision, purchase, and post purchase
evaluation. But, OTAs also create the ‘billboard effect’. When guests discover hotels on OTAs,
most of them do further research about the hotels using search engines, leading to direct website
traffic, and increased direct reservations for hotels (source). A study conducted at
Cornell estimates the incremental reservations from listing on an OTA from 7.5 to 26%. This
does not include reservations booked on the OTA.

For hotel companies, the success of online travel agencies represents both an opportunity in
terms of additional revenues and promotion in new markets and a threat because of the
significant commissions they need to pay and the rising competition for customers’ loyalty. To
be successful in such a challenging and constantly evolving competitive environment, hotel
companies need to learn to cooperate effectively with OTAs as well as to implement innovative
strategies to increase direct bookings.

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Never before have consumers been able to easily compare different travel options side-by-side
in terms of price, time, and location. These platforms offer access to markets once unattainable
by small hoteliers and hostel owners.

The Big Players

Major brands that control the OTA market are Booking.com, Expedia, Priceline, Yatra, Airbnb,
Agoda, Makemytrip etc. These control about 95% of the market in the Worldwide, according
to Forbes. Expedia owns hotels.com and travel velocity, which has 16 million monthly users.
While Priceline, which enjoys 40 million monthly users, owns Booking.com. Booking.com is
by far the largest player in the OTA space. While it is difficult to penetrate the market as an
OTA competitor, the saturated market works in favour of the hotelier. Both consumers and
hoteliers can benefit from the large companies’ ample resources and capabilities.

Airbnb is an online hospitality marketplace, which allows members to offer lodgings or to book
overnight stays. Its offerings primarily consist of home stays, although the brand has branched
out and now lists hotels too. However, Airbnb tends to be quite strict about the hotels it will
allow to be listed on its platform, as they must meet certain criteria. Typically, a hotel will need
to prove that it has unique design characteristics that its rooms have a clear local influence, and
that guests have access to shared common spaces.

Fig. 2.18 – Airbnb logo

The Most Important Online Distribution Channel

Although online travel agencies can play a vital role in terms of distribution, allowing those
within the hotel industry to reach a wider audience, it is important to understand that your own
website should always be the number one priority. After all, bookings made through your
website do not require you to pay commission to a third party, which is important for revenue
management, as it maximises the amount of money you actually receive.

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Assume if 76% of online bookings happen through OTA. However, 50% of the internet users
will visit the official hotel website after discovering them through OTA. This is where
opportunity comes in.

How to Choose OTAs that Fit Your Business

While understanding the importance of online travel agencies, it is often time-consuming to

decide the best sites for your business. Online travel agencies offer property owners of all types
a lot of opportunity. From extended reach to extensive consumer information, OTAs hold a lot
of significance for consumers. Not every OTA is right for every property. By analysing each
OTA and identifying what works best for your property and leverage OTAs to their full
advantage.

Business Model:

The Business Model on which we operate with OTA is a combination of Commission Model
& Control & Pricing Model.

The details of the model are:

A Contract is signed between the Hotel chain and OTA claiming that Hotel will provide certain
percentage of booking amount as commission, the commission varies for different OTA, and
generally it is between 10 to 20 %. The commission is sent to various OTA’s based on total
number of monthly bookings.

Hotel provides all the details to the OTA for listing on the website, whereas the OTA provides
an Extranet to the Hotel for controlling prices, offers, discounts, real time reservation and
content optimisation.

Effectively, online travel agents make bookings on behalf of their users, and they make money
by charging a commission fee to suppliers. The precise fee can vary significantly from service
to service, but is generally a percentage of the amount paid by the customer.

In most cases, the commission fee is paid either after the customer has made their final
payment, or after the travel itself has been completed. The commission fee varies per online
travel agent. For example, the commission of Booking.com could be somewhere between 10

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and 15%, whereas Expedia charges between 18 and between 25%. Higher fees can be charged
in exchange for a higher ranking within search results

2.8.2 Inventory & Prices Distribution

One of the major challenges faced is distributing a hotel inventory and Prices to as many online
platforms as possible. The best solution to this problem is to use a hotel distribution channel
management solution, which allows the various distribution channels to be managed from a
single place

A key part of any hotel industry revolves around distribution channel management also known
as Channel Manager. After all, while direct bookings are usually preferable, maximising
bookings and revenue requires assistance from third-party distribution agents

2.8.3 What is Distribution Channel Management?

Within the hotel industry, a distribution channel refers to a chain of intermediaries that a hotel
room or hotel service passes through before it reaches the customer. These chains can be short,
such as a direct sale from the hotel to the customer, or longer, passing through wholesalers,
online travel agents, retail travel agents or information centre.

Distribution channel management, therefore, is the practice of managing each of these

distribution channels. This can involve managing your rates and booking restrictions, ensuring
your hotel’s inventory is continually updated across all of the different channels, and a variety
of additional tasks.

An effective hotel channel management strategy is imperative for maintaining the partnerships
and business relationships that are necessary in order to optimise sales and maximise revenue.

Chain
Fig. 2.19 – Distribution channel management

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What is a Hotel Distribution Channel Manager?

A hotel distribution channel manager is an online management solution, which allows you to
centralise all of your different distribution channels and manage operations connected to them,
all from the same place. These solutions can be cloud-based or software based and management
operations can be carried out in real-time.

Through the use of a distribution channel manager, all parties involved in the distribution of
hotel rooms or other hotel services can gain live access to key information, such as rates and
availability.

Axis Rooms is the Hotel Distribution Channel Manager that Fabhotel is linked with, all the
OTA prices and Inventory flows through this channel.

Fig. 2.20 – Axis rooms platform

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What Are the Advantages of a Distribution Channel Manager?

Below, you find a list of some of the most significant advantages associated with using a
distribution channel manager.

1. Faster Distribution Channel Management

One of the primary advantages of using a distribution channel manager is the ability to speed
up the processes associated with managing channels. For instance, you will no longer need to
log in to the system of each online travel agent or distribution partner to make adjustments,
because adjustments can be made in one place.

Repetitive tasks can also be automated, saving substantial time on general administration.

2. Fewer Booking Mistakes

Another major advantage for those in the hospitality industry is the improved accuracy offered
by distribution channel managers. As an example, through enhanced transparency and up-to-
date availability, it can solve human error issues, such as over-booking your hotel or property.

Mistakes can often be costly, in terms of time, money and potentially even business
partnerships, so eradicating these is a key channel management priority and can be of enormous
benefit.

3. Availability of Data and Key Metrics

Aside from the pure functional aspects of distribution channel managers, these solutions also
offer the added bonus of providing all OTA in a single place. This can be of great strategic
benefit, allowing hotel owners and other business leaders to identify notable trends or patterns.

From there, it becomes easier to make key strategic decisions, which are supported by evidence
or data.

4. Facilitate Direct Hotel Bookings

Most distribution channel manager platforms also include a built-in booking engine, or the
ability to connect with your own booking engine, allowing customers to make more bookings.

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This can be of great value for revenue management purposes, because direct bookings are the
simplest distribution channel and do not require the hotel or resort to pay commission fees to a
third-party distributor.

5. Improve Revenue and Business Performance

Finally, the use of a distribution channel manager can help to improve revenue and business
performance in a number of ways. For example, the platform will enable a more dynamic
approach to room rates, allowing adjustments to be made quickly, in the moment, across all
channels in the system.

Additionally, distribution channel managers can make it easier to add new distribution partners
and improve overall hotel visibility, which then potentially increases demand, occupancy rates
and the amount that can be charged.

Contract

Listing of
Properties

Content &
Images
Optimisation

Mapping &
Price Syncing

Discount and
Offers from
Hotels

Marketing &
Promotions
by OTA

FIG. 2.21 – ON BOARDING PROCESS

Tracking Performance & Listings:

In any business regular tracking of its performance is very essential part,

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In case if you have 500 properties with every day new properties coming and old properties
getting delisted, there should be a dynamic tracker that helps you simplify your work.

For the properties that get delisted, the Hotel IDs of following properties are Informed to OTA,
and for new properties the same process of listing is followed starting with mapping with
Channel Manager to Syncing of Prices. These processes should be carried out on weekly
process.

Problems faced:

The only problem that comes when your property is listed with the OTA is disparity issue.
Every day you may get huge number of cases of Price and Inventory Disparity Issues, these
are discussed in detail in later section

Marketing & Strategies for OTA

Although all the OTA’s do their own Marketing but sometimes it is essential to conduct
meetings with them planning strategies how you can dominate on their platform, the following
are mentioned below:

• Visibility is the most important factor on an OTA, i.e. your hotels should be visible on
the top on the 1st page of that OTA, and there are many factors depending on different
OTA’s that depend your visibility mainly content relevancy and price parity.
• Other than this we can ask the OTA’s to run special Offer s for our Hotels or give higher
cashback in case of Paytm.
• Specific Banner/ Webpage of your chain on the OTA is the best thing we can have as
this will be like a microsite for exclusively our hotels, moreover it attracts customers
and wins their trust.

Hotel Rate Disparity?

Rate disparity is more common than many realize, especially for small accommodation
providers. This is why it’s critical that you monitor your rates across all of your channels in
order to check for rate disparity issues. While you need to increase your distribution channels,
you also need to make sure that you remain competitive with them to ensure a balanced
distribution strategy.

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What is rate disparity?

Rate disparity occurs when higher rates are being offered on OTAs and other distribution
channels than you offering on your own website. The reverse can happen, but it’s rare since
many agreements with OTAs include rate parity clauses.

If rate disparity occurs, it can have a significant impact on your hotel and how it operates.

• Your guests may lose trust in you, since they will be able to find lower rates through
other channels.
• You will lose out on direct bookings — which are far more lucrative than indirect
bookings, since direct bookings come without commission fees.
• It distorts your revenue-management work since you are varying prices without having
the certainty of how much of this price change actually reaches the client.
• It has a hugely negative impact on your direct sales: Why would clients book on your
website if there are lower rates out there that are easier to find?
• It generally drives towards lower profitability for your hotel, since the channels that
give you the worst levels of profit are, at the same time, those which have more margin
to create price disparities. Therefore, the channels which interest you the least will sell
more than those that interest you the most.

Why does it happen?

Rate disparity is most often created by administrative issues, which is why it is critical that
small hotel operators work with a business solution that helps streamline their administrative
tasks.

Here are a few factors that contribute to rate disparity:

• OTAs are able to run out-of-date rates because the promotion has not been closed out
by the hotel on their channel manager.
• The OTAs place your wholesale rates on sale, significantly cutting into your bottom
line.
• Administrators work with OTA market managers to create direct promotions, making
those same promotions unavailable on the hotel’s website.

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 • The OTA is using a different currency conversion than your hotel, leaving you with
rate disparity issues to overcome.
• The OTAs use these commission fees in order to discount the rates that they are
offering, making them appear more affordable than booking directly through the hotel.
• Promotions might have been created directly with an OTA Market Manager or through
and OTA extranet, meaning it isn't available on the hotel website.
• A property has an out-of-date rate code still running on an OTA. Remember to close
them.
• The OTA has failed to change the rate they were given, for technical or other reasons –
this may apply across the board or only to certain geographic markets.
• The OTA is using a different currency conversion rate than your hotel.
• The OTA has a base allocation, and you've sold out all other rooms of that grade and
below.
• The revenue manager at the hotel accidentally links to the wrong OTA rate,
inadvertently creating rate disparity and helping the OTAs sell more than the hotel
• itself.

Web
site

Fig. 2.22 – Price disparity

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 3. WORK

I was involved in various projects across two different verticals, namely, Digital Marketing and
Online Travel Agencies – Airbnb. In the first half of my internship, I worked full time in the
digital marketing team and later on I was working in both the teams. Apart from these projects,
I also learnt about the work of other verticals and gained some hands-on experience in a few.
Being a part of a startup, I got full ownership of my work which was challenging and which
made me think out of the box and bring some creativity in the task. I also developed ideas
which were different from the routine work and regularly discussed them with my team and
other colleagues. Interacting with a lot of people was beneficial as it brought new ideas on how
to improve the efficiency of the work and how it can help to bring harmony between the
different teams.

3.1 Digital Marketing

I undertook many projects in digital marketing which were spread over a course of 5 months.
The last month was spent on learning new things about other areas of work. During the first
few weeks, I was given training and special sessions by senior team members and my mentor
which helped me understand about the various aspects of digital marketing, what is the work
done here, what are the targets etc. Then, the first minor project was given to me along with
other interns. After completing that I was formally inducted in to the SEM (Search Engine
Marketing) team where I was given further training on SEM and the softwares and strategies
related to it. I managed the whole account of Google Ads of FabHotels with my mentor. I learnt
a lot about SEM and all the optimization techniques related to it and gained expertise in it. I
was working on a project which is usually given to professionals with 2-3 years of experience.
I worked on different platforms and softwares and I was closely associated with the team head
and the senior management. In the last one month of my internship, I worked on Facebook
Ads, Bing Ads, Google Hotel Ads and got hands on experience on other areas of digital
marketing like CRM, Affiliate marketing, Social Media Marketing etc.

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3.1.1 YouTube Influencers

The first project given to me was titled “YouTube Influencers “. YouTube influencer is
someone who builds a substantial following on the video platform of YouTube, thereby helping
to set trends and provide information for others looking to purchase a specific product or
service. The main aim of the project was to contact the most popular youtubers in the areas of
travel, hospitality, food, lifestyle etc. for paid promotion.

Since, a lot of people watch YouTube and these YouTube personalities have millions of
followers, it was a great opportunity to partner with them as this would increase the visibility
of FabHotels brand, more people will get to know about it. Also, travel is a trending and one
of the most followed topics on YouTube and FabHotels brand is related to it so it was a great
opportunity. My task was to create an organized dataset of all these YouTube influencers so
that the company can contact them.

The tasks of this project were –

1. To create a data of all the popular YouTube influencers related to our brand.
2. To organize the data and get meaningful insights from it.
3. Presenting this data to the senior management.

The software used for this purpose was – MS Excel. I created a list of 100+ YouTube
influencers along with important characteristics –

• Channel name
• Contact
• City
• Category
• Subscribers
• Twitter link
• Twitter followers
• Instagram link
• Instagram followers
• Facebook link
• Facebook followers
• Channel description
• Total views
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 • Number of videos

I created this data along with my co-intern and then presented this data to our project head.

Here are the screenshots of my work –

Fig. 3.1 – YouTube influencers google sheets (1)

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Fig. 3.2 - Fig. 1 – YouTube influencers google sheets (2)

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3.1.2 Google Ads Optimization
This was the major project that I was a part of. Google Ads was the 2nd largest source of revenue
for FabHotels when I joined and later on it became the largest source of revenue. The biggest
part of the marketing budget was for Google Ads. Google Ads is a part of Search Engine
Marketing (SEM). The main aim of running Google Ads was customer acquisition. Customer
acquisition refers to gaining new consumers. Acquiring new customers involves persuading
consumers to purchase a company’s products and/or services. Acquiring customers is a costly
affair so the main aim of this project was optimizing the Google Ads account so that the cost
could be optimized and revenue could be increased from a given budget. Another aim of using
google ads was to increase the demand for the product of the company. By running google ads,
more people will get to know about FabHotels and more people will use the product and do a
transaction. The product here is the website or the app. So, the demand increases and then it is
the task of the supply team to cater to this demand.

This project included mainly two parts – operational tasks and strategy. The strategy was made
at the upper management level and then communicated to us. Then at our level, I had to
understand that strategy and I was given the freedom to make changes to it at my level so that
the efficiency of the work could be improved. The ultimate goal was to meet the daily and
monthly targets as this was totally on the business side of the brand. Apart from the routine
operational tasks including hygiene check, making reports, I undertook some additional tasks
like automation which would improve the efficiency and decrease the time taken to complete
the daily operational tasks. For that, I developed ideas on automation and also tested them
practically after discussing it with my colleagues and mentor. I did automation for some
specific parts of the project. I used R and SQL programming languages for this.

The most important part of the optimization was analytics. Using data from multiple tracking
and measuring platforms, I was able to understand trends in the performance on every level of
the account and this helped me to take decisions on the performance and strategy. I worked on
excel, google analytics for this. Future scope of work in analytics includes using python for
data visualization etc.

During the initial stages of the project, I also made daily reports on the performance of the
campaigns and the account and shared with my team and the head. Later on, this work was
given to someone else so that I could focus more on the optimization part. The business data

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was shared to us on daily basis in which we could see our performance and then make suitable
changes to our work.

The tasks of the project were –

• To create campaigns, ad groups, keywords for different hotels, cities, offers,

audiences etc
• To maintain the hygiene of the account
• To make bid and budget adjustments according to the marketing strategy
• To make different kinds of reports on MS Excel, Google Analytics and Singular
software
• To analyse the performance data for optimization on account/campaign/ad
group/keyword level
• To test different types of ads and monitor their performance
• To automate the filtering of search queries and addition of negative keywords
• To fix the errors in the google ads account
• To work on the recommendations provided by the platform
• To improve the cost per acquisition (CPA), cost incurred over revenue (CIR)
and other parameters
• To scale the transactions while keeping a check on the CIR
• To optimize the campaigns on basis of device, location, audience etc.
• To create and optimize remarketing campaigns
• To optimize the placements in display campaigns
• To complete the integration of Google Hotel Ads (GHA) with Google Ads
• To create daily and monthly reports for analysing the performance
• To manage google ads along with other marketing tools (Performance
Marketing)
• To discuss performance parameters with other teams and make the required
changes
• To import google ads data to Bing ads
• To improve the ROI and ROAS of the account
• To complete certifications of google ads and google analytics

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All the work was done using these platforms and softwares which are discussed later –

1. Google ads
2. Google analytics
3. Google ads editor
4. MS excel
5. Singular
6. Appsflyer
7. Gmail

Google ads account overview

Three types of campaigns were there in the FabHotels google ads account, namely – Search,
display and UAC (universal app campaigns). Later on, GHA (google hotel ads) was also
integrated into google ads.

There were different types of search campaigns –

1. Branded – These were the campaigns in which the branded keywords were
running. Branded keywords included those which contained the name of the
brand FabHotels in them in different forms like ‘fabhotels’, ‘fab hotels’, fab
hotel’, ‘fabhotel’ etc. These campaigns are high performing as the users here
are relevant. These campaigns were categorized on the basis of cities, hotels etc.

2. Partners – These were the campaigns which included the name of the hotels in
the keywords. Partner campaigns were categorized on the basis of different
cities and each campaign contained all the hotels in that particular city as ad
groups. The main principle behind partner campaigns was that the properties
currently under fabhotels were individual hotels in the past. So, a user searching
for that particular hotel would see its ad as a fabhotel.

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 3. Non-branded – These were the campaigns which didn’t include brand name in
the keywords, they included the word ‘hotel’ in them. These campaigns were
for acquiring new users. There was heavy competition for these keywords.
Examples – ‘hotels in delhi’, ‘hotels in koramangala’ etc. These campaigns
included locality and city level campaigns.

4. DSA (dynamic search ads) – The DSA campaigns are keyword less campaigns
which generate the ad including its headlines, description, URLs dynamically
using the account data feed. It was not possible to cover every keyword possible
using other campaigns so that gap is filled by DSA campaigns as it shows ads
to keywords on which we were not bidding. It, however, had high level of
irrelevancy.

5. RLSA (remarketing list for search ads) – RLSA campaigns were remarketing
campaigns in which users who had previously completed a transaction or visited
the website or had abandoned the cart were included as audiences. These users
were relevant users and the ad copies were also different for them.

The display campaigns included generic as well as remarketing campaigns. These campaigns
don’t have any keywords, they have placements which are the websites and URLs where the
image or banner ads would show.

The UAC campaigns included campaigns aimed at transactions, app installs, app actions etc.
Campaigns for different linguistic groups were also created. UAC campaigns included
creatives and ad assets. These campaigns use automated bidding by default. Google uses
machine learning to set bids for UAC campaigns.

The major assignments of the project were as follows –

• Understanding the google ads environment –

I was given training in google ads and its related platforms and softwares in which I’ll
be working. I had earlier done some online courses on digital marketing which helped
me in the real industry projects. The first few days of the project were spent on this. I
was also given training on the google ads editor which is a very useful software for the

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 bulk operations and it reduces the time taken for all the operational jobs. It is difficult
to master but I was able to learn it quickly.

• Creating new campaigns –

New campaigns had to be created from time to time according to the property, city,
locality or according to the marketing strategy. Creating new campaigns was done in
the google ads editor.

For creating new campaigns, a copy of some already running campaign was created
and then the changes were made in this copy. The steps were as follows –
1. Change the campaign name, type, budget, bidding method.
2. Then go to ad group, change its name and set the max cpc.
3. Then go to ads (ad copy), make changes in the ad headlines, descriptions, path,
landing page.
4. Then go to keywords and add new keywords according to the type of campaign
and the match type.

• Hygiene check –
Hygiene check is not a big task but a very important one when running google ads
campaigns. Since, it is a big google ads account with 1000+ campaigns, thousands of
ad groups lakhs of keywords, there is a need to properly organize the whole account
and minimize the errors especially in the keywords as otherwise it can lead to loss of
thousands of rupees as google ads deals with money and a slight error can lead to huge
losses.

So, hygiene check is done according to a schedule like once or twice a month or more
than that. In hygiene check, I checked whether all the required campaigns are running
or not, their ad groups, ad copies, keywords etc. Special attention was given to the
match type of the keywords so that there is no leakage of budget. All this was done on
the google ads editor. The google ads platform also tells you if there is any error or
something is not right in your account.

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• Property tracker –
Since a major proportion of the campaigns were based on the properties(hotels) of
FabHotels, it was necessary to maintain a property tracker so that whenever a new
property gets live on the FabHotels website or some property gets delisted, we get to
know that and make the required changes in the campaigns.

If a new property comes, I then created its partner campaign, city, locality campaigns
among others. If some property got delisted, then I paused all the campaigns related to
it as that property would not be giving us any revenue after.

So, I made a property tracker on ‘Google Sheets’ using ‘queries’ which are a built-in
feature of google sheets. I linked my main sheet to other sheets which had the
information about the property status. By running the queries, I was able to know the
current status of the properties and information about their various types of campaigns.
New properties would also get updated on the list. So, in one master list I had all the
handy information which I needed so that I could quickly make the changes in google
ads. For this purpose, I used data from the google ads platform and daily system
generated emails.

• Below is the screenshot of the tracker and Sample Google Query

• This query extracts D and B column subjected to conditions from table A to L
column in Live Properties Sheet.

=query('Live Properties'!A:L,
"select D,B where J = 0
and H is not null order by B,D
")

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Fig. 3.3 – Property and campaign tracker for SEM

• Daily Performance Reports:

Daily report about the spending and the revenue generated is also very essential as it helps to
keep a track how the business is going. It is one of the most crucial part. For making reports
data from Google ads as well as Google Analytics is needed and then both are mapped on the
basis of the Ad Group and the numbers are added resulting into the performance report.

Campaig Impression Install Revenu Transaction CI

n s Clicks CTR Cost s CPI e INR s CPT R
Campaign XXX XXX XXX XXX XXX
Name XXXX X X X XXXX X XXXX XXXX X XX
Grand XXX XXX XXX XXX XXX
Total XXXX X X X XXXX X XXXX XXXX X XX

Fig. 3.4 – Performance reports

Similar report is made for tracking Monthly Performance.

We can use Macros VBA to automate the report work, thus it can be updated easily daily.
Below is the sample of Macros Snippet:

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Fig. 3.5 – Macros snippet

• CPA optimization –
CPA is cost per acquisition which the total cost spent per transaction. The goal was to
lower the CPA for the given budget. For optimizing the CPA of the campaigns, I took
the help of data from google analytics (for search and display campaigns) and singular
(for app campaigns). I organized that data according to campaigns, ad groups or
keywords. Keyword level data provided the most clarity as keywords are the bottom
most level of any campaign and optimizing at the keyword level is one of the best
practices. By looking at which campaign was not performing, I then looked at the ad
groups of that keyword and then the keywords of a particular ad group. So, the
optimization can be done at 3 levels – Campaign level, ad group level, keyword level –

1. Campaign level –
Campaign level optimization includes looking at the account level data and
determining which campaign is performing and non-performing. If a campaign
is not performing, we can simply reduce its daily budget or pause it. For
performing campaigns, we can increase the daily budget. But this type of
optimization does not give enough clarity, it is mainly used when we decide to
run a particular type of campaign according to the marketing strategy. For better
understanding and optimization which can give good results, we have other
types of optimization.

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 2. Ad group level –
Ad group level optimization includes optimizing the bid across various ad
groups in a campaign. For example, in a locality campaign, the ad groups will
be for the localities in a particular city. So, if some locality is not performing,
we can change the max CPC or whatever on the basis of the bid strategy. We
can also do device bid adjustments.

3. Keyword level –
This is the deepest level of optimization and gives the most accurate results.
Even if some campaign or its ad group is not performing, we can look at the
keywords and see which keywords are performing and which are not. Then we
can pause the non performing keywords or lower their bids. The performing
keywords can be kept running at their CPC or in case of performing campaigns
the CPC can be increased.

• Search queries and negative keywords –

A very important technique for cost optimization is filtering the search queries. Search
queries are those searches done by google users in which our ad shows. In BMM and
phrase campaigns, there are a lot of irrelevant search queries for which the ad shows.
These leads to increased costs and no revenue. So, it was very important to filter the
search queries on a routine basis and then add them as negative keywords.

Negative keywords are those keywords for which our ads won’t show. So, the goal was
to cover as many negative keywords as possible for different types of campaigns. For
example, a negative keyword for a locality campaign would be a keyword in which
there is name of a hotel. Also, if a user is searching for veg hotels then it is irrelevant
as the user is not interested in booking a room.

Cost optimization through search queries was very successful. For the locality
campaigns, I was able to lower the costs by as much as 40%, for DSA campaigns, by
as much as 10-15%. This technique also helps in reducing the cost per transaction (CPT
or CPA). The search queries data is provided by google.

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 Apart from this, relevant keywords could also be figured out from the search queries.
Those search queries which had high transactions or low CPC or low CPA were also
relevant. Another technique for cost optimization and CPA optimization is filtering the
search queries of BMM campaigns and adding the relevant keywords in exact match to
the exact match type campaigns. This was a very successful technique.

• Automation –
Automation played a very important role in reducing the time spent on the operational
tasks. Since this was a completely new project which was on a trial basis and was
recommended by me to my mentor, I tried automation on a specific part of the project.
I tried automation on the search queries so as to reduce the time taken in filtering the
search queries. SQL programming language was used for this purpose. Queries were
written in SQL which contained all those words and phrases which we didn’t want in
the search queries. In this way, I was able to filter out all the irrelevant search queries
and convert them to negative keywords. Since SQL has the ability to work on large
databases, I could automate the negative keyword tasks for all the google ads account
data using this automation technique. This was a very successful assignment and it
considerably increased the efficiency of the project work.

Automation was also tried on getting the google analytics data for a large period of
time. Since the company used google analytics basic version, it was possible to only
get the sampled data for a large period of time (for example – 1 month etc.). So, it took
considerable amount of time to get the data from google analytics as I had to take out
the data for multiple short intervals and then combine it. So, I used the R programming
language and wrote code for getting the complete google analytics (GA) data. This was
very helpful so that I can reduce the time taken in getting the data and spend more time
on the analysis part.

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Given below is the file containg search terms, there matchtype, Clicks, Impressions, Cost,
conversions etc, have a look and see irrelevant terms.

Irrelevant

Irrelevant

Fig. 3.6 – Search terms report

The above file shows the sample search terms file, there are many approaches that can be done
for filtering these.

First and primary is manually going through the queries and marking the irrelevant queries.
But if the search terms are around 5000 per Ad Group and you have around 1000 different
campaigns. Solving this manually will take a huge amount of manpower and ambiguous.

An Improvement to the above can be using MS Excel ample amount of functions that are
available. This can simplify your work to great extent.

A sample function used for filtering the above query is shown below:

=IF(OR(NOT(OR(ISNUMBER(SEARCH({"Words/Phrases to be included"},A2)))),

,OR(ISNUMBER(SEARCH({"Not to be Included"},A2)))),"YES","NO")

• Thus using Array functions in Excel, based upon our understanding of the consumer
pattern of search we can try adding words/phrases that shows the search term is relevant
like Hotel, Budget Friendly, Cheap, etc. and some words that are supposed to be
negated as they depict that the user is not willing to buy our product still we are showing
our Ad, thus wasting cost.

But this method also fails sometimes when there is a huge amount of search terms due to certain
limits of excel while dealing with data.

• Solution to the above can be implementing the same on SQL (Structured Query
Language) that are really helpful while dealing with huge amount of data.

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But as it is a CSV file and SQL operates on database, thus we have to load the CSV files on
the SQL Server using Flat CSV function.

Fig. 3.7 – SQL code snippet

Thus, this simplifies the work and saves huge amount of time that was wasted earlier while
filtering out search terms manually, apart from cutting the cost wasted in irrelevant terms.

Finding Converting Keywords:

We have seen in the previous section that there are multiple ways by which we can negate the
terms that are irrelevant for our product, but many times there are search terms that we don’t
not have as our keywords but are converting and we should bid that too.
Moreover, there are times when user is searching is searching for a particular locality and Ad
of a particular Hotel is shown or Vice Versa.
Thus, in this case, we are not reaching the exact purpose which the user is searching/ want thus
might not convert. To solve this issue, we on regular basis filter the campaigns to find any
converting terms that are triggering there and instead should be present in another campaign.
Apart from above cases, assume a new product/ newly acquired property which is as of now
not associated with the brand, hence its brand value is zero, but after some time when it gets a
value. The Branded Ad group of the above should be made as Branded campaigns are the one
where we get minimum expenditure (These details of why this happens is covered in later part).
How to find relevant search terms?

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There are certain parameters on which we decide whether a search term is relevant. Based
upon the Impressions, Clicks, and CTR it shows how often are the customers searching for a
particular search term and out of those how many are clicking those Ads.

Fig. 3.8 – Search terms report (2)

The above figure shows how we find the relevant Search Terms from Dynamic Search Ads,
and these search terms can be used as keywords for the specific localities as shown above.
Clearly the similar approaches as mentioned in the previous section can be used to automate
the process of finding relevant words.
So let’s see what and how Excel functions can be used for the above case:

=IF(AND(C19>=5,
OR(ISNUMBER(SEARCH({"Station","Airport","Charbagh","haz
","gomti"},A19)))),
"YES","NO")

Automation in google analytics -

The use of free version of Google Analytics come with a limitation i.e. for tracking purpose
and reports we cannot download all the data in one go. We have to download the data in small
chunks.

The above issue can be simplified and moreover automated by using R language and linking R
with Google Analytics thus enabling us to download the data in one go.

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Below in the screenshot of the code, it links Google Analytics using RGoogleAnalytics Library
which downloads all the data into a CSV format.

FIGURE 1: R STUDIO

Fig. 3.9 – R studio code snippet

• Certifications –
Towards the later part of my internship, I was given the task to complete the authorised
google ads certifications and the google analytics individual qualification certification
provided by google. I gave multiple 1-2 hours tests and I was able to complete all the
certifications by scoring more than 80% in all the tests. These authentic certifications
from google prove my knowledge and expertise in these areas and these certifications
are a mark of my professional experience.

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Fig. 3.10 – Certification (1)

82
Fig. 3.11 – Certification (2)

83
Fig. 3.12 – Certification (3)

84
Fig. 3.13 – Certification (4)

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• Monthly targets –
Since SEM was the largest source of revenue for the company, the targets were big and
the senior management had high expectations from our team. Since, me and mentor
were the only employees working on this under the supervision of the head of digital
marketing, it was a daunting task to meet all the targets and maintain a good target run
rate. In the initial few weeks, my major task was to learn everything about google ads
and get hands on experience but after that I was also involved in the complete business
side of the project. Meeting monthly targets was not an easy job. We had to scale the
transactions for meeting the targets which increased the costs while at the same time
we had to make sure the CIR didn’t increase. Acquiring new customers is always a
costly affair – that’s what user acquisition through google ads was all about. There is a
lot of competition on google ads. So, cost optimization and revenue optimization
became extremely important. We could simply raise the bids and budgets and this
would have increased the transactions but the CIR would have also increased. So, in
the limited budget, we had to scale the transactions.

To achieve this daunting task, it was very important to analyse the performance at every
level possible and develop our strategy accordingly. The use of data was very important
here. Under the guidance of my mentor, I worked tirelessly on this.

For increasing the transactions, I worked on the branded campaigns because that’s
where our most loyal customers came from. So, I increased the spending there, added
new keywords, negative keywords etc. For cost optimization, I put my effort on the
non-branded and dsa campaigns. Transactions increased from the branded campaigns
and cost reduced from the non-branded campaigns so the overall CIR remained under
control.

I also worked on the remarketing campaigns where the spend was increased and specific
audiences were targeted to increase the transactions from there. Remarketing
campaigns helped us a lot in achieving our goals.

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3.1.3 Facebook Ads Optimization –

Facebook ads were initialized on 21st of January, 2019 and it turned out to be a great project

as it became the 3rd most revenue generating system. Major aim to start Facebook ads was to

acquire new customers and brand recognition. Though afterwards the audience planning got

well and we tried it on app installs as well.

App installation was boosted on google play on the daily basis with very low CPC. Acquiring
new customers involve persuading consumers to purchase a company’s products and/or
services.

Acquiring customers is a costly affair so the main aim of this project was optimizing the

Facebook ads so that the cost could be optimized and revenue could be increased from a given

budget. Another aim of using Facebook ads was to increase the demand for the product of the

company. By running Facebook ads, more people will get to know about FabHotels and more

people will use the product and do a transaction. The product here is the website or the app.

So, the demand increases and then it is the task of the supply team to cater to this demand.

Various tests were run daily to get objective and audience crystal. As Facebook is the most

used social media tool in the world and every 1in 4 person is on Facebook. So, audiences of

what kind will be targeted through the ads were to be decided.

At the initial stage, the ads were run at the minimal cost of Rs. 100 per day and if the

audience worked, then budget will be changed accordingly. Then with the same audience

various ad creatives were tested.

There was a step by step increment in the budget of the campaigns run over the Facebook.

Then an important analysis happened and helped us work on app installs.

The analysis involved that out of the user who installed the app, 8.3% booked the hotel and

2.1% booked the hotel again.

So, making them 10.4% people booked the hotel on 23 INR as an average cost per install. So

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let’s say 100 installs took place and that costs 23*100 = 2300 and let’s round to 10 people

book a hotel on an average price of 850. So, 850*10 = Rs.8500 as Return on Investment,

which fascinated the whole team and team started working on app install campaigns on

Facebook.

Major objective was to increase the revenue with less CIR i.e. Cost incurred over Revenue.

So, the daily tasks involved:

1. Campaign is decided.

2. Create and plan the audience with the budget allocated to the audience.

3. Plan the creatives in accordance to the ad and ask the creative team for the

update.

4. Content is finalized and then the ad is ready to be launched.

5. Update the team about the previous day reports and performance.

6. Analyse the ads and work with the manager to progress further.

After the launch of ads, it was crucial to attract the customers with various offers. So, I

involved CRM team regarding the launch of offers.

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3.2 Airbnb

Travel as an industry has been evolving dramatically. In recent years, sharing economies have
become more popular, giving rise to companies like Airbnb that utilize sharing economies to
create an online marketplace for the exchange of private products and services. Sharing
economies have complex dynamics in how they form relationships between market
participants. The lines between customer and seller become blurred, and trust has become an
increasingly important factor as this trend continues to grow.

Fig. 3.14 – Airbnb website

Listings –

The process of handling Airbnb is a little different compared to other OTA’s as they do not
have their own extranet. They are done via Channel Manager Axis Rooms. But there are certain
rules which we need to follow while listing of properties so as to make sure that the guest has
the correct detailed information before the booking is confirmed.

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Fig. 3.15 – Airbnb axis rooms listing.

• The listing name should not have the actual name of the hotel. Also, Fabhotels tagging
should not be mentioned anywhere in the listings.
• The correct detailed location and coordinates should be mentioned.
• There should be a minimum of 7 pictures of HD quality for the guests to see and review
the property.
• A minimum charge of INR 347/- is charged on one extra person being added while
booking.
• The tagging should be under Boutique hotels only.
• The correct information should be mentioned in the description column which is further
divided into sub categories such as access, space, interaction etc.
• Complete details of the House Rules should be provided so that the guest makes the
booking only if they are convenient with it.
• After this procedure Airbnb reviews each of our listings and approves them only if all
the parameters are fulfilled. Once we get the approval, we need to channel connect all
the properties in order to make them live on our Airbnb platform. After this the required
number of discounts can be pushed in order to reach a convenient sell price for the
properties.

Pricing and Inventory Flow

Here different prices are given depending on the occasion, to boost the sales.

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Fig. 3.16 – Pricing on Airbnb

Discounts

The discounts which can be added from the CRS backend are-

Long Stay Discount

We provide a 5% discount on a minimum booking of 4RN’s. These discounts can be varied

according to our own convenience.

Early Bird Discount

We provide an additional 5% discount if the guest makes the booking 30 days prior to the check
in.

Last Minute Discount

After analysing the booking window which is of 3-4 days, we decided to provide 5% additional
discount for the guests who book one day prior or on the same day.

Comset Pricing Analysis:

This means comparing the characteristics & prices of your property with that of other
competitors.

This is done considering certain factors like amenities, checkpoints near location, room size
etc.

All the competitors’ properties present within 2 km of the property are compared and if the
property is competent, they are taken into consideration.

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Insights from Data:

Based on monthly calling data analysis the trends of outbound and inbound sales, bounced
calls. This is done by using Excel function and Using flags and lookup and then visualising the
filtered data. Below is the screenshot of a sample analysed data:

Fig. 3.17 - Insights

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 4. SOFTWARES/PLATFORMS USED

4.1 MS Excel
Microsoft Excel is developed by Microsoft for Windows, macOS, Android and iOS. It
is a spreadsheet software and includes features like calculation, graphing tools, pivot
tables, and a macro programming language called Visual Basic for Applications. It has
been a very widely applied spreadsheet for these platforms, especially since version 5
in 1993, and it has replaced Lotus 1-2-3 as the industry standard for spreadsheets. Excel
forms part of the Microsoft Office suite of software.

Fig. 4.1 – MS Excel logo

Fig. 4.2 – MS Excel 2016 software

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4.2 Google sheets
Google Sheets is a spreadsheet program included as part of a free, web-
based software office suite offered by Google within its Google Drive service. The
service also includes Google Docs and Google Slides , a word
processor and presentation program respectively. Google Sheets is available as a web
application, mobile app for Android, iOS, Windows, BlackBerry, and as a desktop
application on Google's Chrome-OS. The app is compatible with Microsoft Excel file
formats.[2] The app allows users to create and edit files online while collaborating with
other users in real-time. Edits are tracked by user with a revision history presenting
changes. An editor's position is highlighted with an editor-specific colour and cursor
and a permissions system regulates what users can do. Updates have introduced features
using machine learning, including "Explore", offering answers based on natural
language questions in a spreadsheet.

Fig. 4.3 – Google sheets logo

Fig. 4.4 – Google sheets platform

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4.3 Google ads

Google Ads (previously Google AdWords, before July 24, 2018)[2] is an online
advertising platform developed by Google, where advertisers pay to display
brief advertisements, service offerings, product listings, video content, and generate
mobile application installs within the Google ad network to web users.[3]

Google Ads has evolved into Google's main source of revenue, contributing to
Google's total advertising revenues of US$95.4 billion in 2017.[4] Google Ads offers
services under a pay-per-click (PPC) pricing model. Although an advanced bidding
strategy can be used to automatically reach a predefined cost-per-acquisition (CPA),
this should not be confused with a true CPA pricing model.[5]

Sales and support for Google's AdWords division in the United States is based
in Mountain View, California, with major secondary offices
in Hyderabad, Dublin, Singapore, Ann Arbor[6] and New York City. The third-largest
US facility is the Googleplex,[7] Google's headquarters, which is located in Mountain
View, California. Google AdWords engineering is based at the Googleplex, with
major secondary offices in Los Angeles and New York.

As of June 2018, Google derives 86% of its total revenues through trading advertising
inventory through AdWords, DoubleClick AdExchange, and DoubleClick Bid
Manager, among others.

Fig. 4.5 – Google ads logo

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Fig. 4.6 – Google ads platform

4.4 Google ads editor

Google ads editor is a software developed by google LLC which come under the
google ads platform. It is available as a downloaded file. The editor is used for all the
bulk actions to be performed on google ads. Whenever, you have to create multiple
campaigns, ad groups, keywords, ads, extensions etc. or want to make changes to the
existing campaigns etc., editor is the software to do that. It can be linked to the main
google ads account. Regular updates from google keeps the software fresh and free
from bugs. Multiple google ads accounts can be managed from the editor. Since, any
google ads account can contain thousands of campaigns, working on editor is of prime
importance as it saves time and errors. We can import and export data to and from the
editor.

Downloading the data after opening the editor is mandatory so that all the changes
reflect in the account properly. Multiple people can work on the editor at the same
time. It is a very useful software accompanying the google ads platform.

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 Fig. 4.7 – Google ads editor software

4.5 Google analytics

Google Analytics is a web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports
website traffic, currently as a platform inside the Google Marketing
Platform brand.[1] Google launched the service in November 2005 after acquiring
developer Urchin.[2][3]

Google Analytics is the most widely used web analytics service on the web.[4] Google
Analytics provides an SDK that allows gathering usage data
from iOS and Android app, known as Google Analytics for Mobile Apps

Google analytics is a very useful platform without which digital marketing is

incomplete. All the performance data and transaction data are available on the google
analytics platform. It is a tracking and measuring platform which collects data from
the websites using pixels or web tracking codes.

Apart from the all the measuring abilities, the unique feature of google analytics is the
different types of reports it generates.

The different types of reports in google analytics are –

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 1. Realtime

2. Audience

3. Acquisition

4. Behaviour

5. Conversions

These are the standard reports available in the google analytics platform. Apart from these, a
user can also create custom reports depending on the requirements.

Fig. 4.8 - Google analytics platform

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4.6 Gmail

Gmail is a free email service developed by Google. Users can access Gmail on
the web and using third-party programs that synchronize email content
through POP or IMAP protocols. Gmail started as a limited beta release on April 1,
2004 and ended its testing phase on July 7, 2009. Google's mail servers automatically
scan emails for multiple purposes, including to filter spam and malware, and to add
context-sensitive advertisements next to emails. This advertising practice has been
significantly criticized by privacy advocates due to concerns over unlimited data
retention, ease of monitoring by third parties, users of other email providers not
having agreed to the policy upon sending emails to Gmail addresses, and the potential
for Google to change its policies to further decrease privacy by combining
information with other Google data usage. The company has been the subject of
lawsuits concerning the issues. Google has stated that email users must "necessarily
expect" their emails to be subject to automated processing and claims that the service
refrains from displaying ads next to potentially sensitive messages, such as those
mentioning race, religion, sexual orientation, health, or financial statements. In June
2017, Google announced the upcoming end to the use of contextual Gmail content for
advertising purposes, relying instead on data gathered from the use of its other
services. By February 2016, Gmail had one billion active users worldwide.

Fig. 4.9 – Gmail logo

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4.7 Singular

Singular is a marketing intelligence platform. This platform was used for all the app
related analytics. It gives performance, measuring, analytics reports related to the
mobile app transactions and activities like installs etc. It is a SaaS (software as a
service) platform provided by singular Inc.

Another similar platform was used in my latter half of the internship that was -
‘Appsflyer’. It is also a SaaS platform.

4.8 R Studio

RStudio is a free and open-source integrated development environment (IDE) for R,

a programming language for statistical computing and graphics. RStudio was founded
by JJ Allaire,[5] creator of the programming language ColdFusion. Hadley Wickham is
the Chief Scientist at RStudio. RStudio is available in two editions: RStudio Desktop,
where the program is run locally as a regular desktop application; and RStudio Server,
which allows accessing RStudio using a web browser while it is running on a remote
Linux server. Pre-packaged distributions of RStudio Desktop are available
for Windows, macOS, and Linux.

RStudio is available in open source and commercial editions and runs on the desktop
(Windows, macOS, and Linux) or in a browser connected to RStudio Server or
RStudio Server Pro (Debian, Ubuntu, Red Hat
Linux, CentOS, openSUSE and SLES).[7]

RStudio is partly written in the C++ programming language and uses the Qt
framework for its graphical user interface.[8] The bigger percentage of the code is
written in Java. JavaScript is also amongst the languages used.

4.9 SQL Dbeaver

DBeaver is an SQL client and a database administration tool. For relational

databases it uses the JDBC API to interact with databases via a JDBC driver. For
other databases (NoSQL) it uses proprietary database drivers. It provides an editor

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that supports code completion and syntax highlighting. It provides a plugin
architecture (based on the Eclipse plugins architecture) that allows users to modify
much of the application's behaviour to provide database-specific functionality or
features that are database-independent. This is a desktop application written
in Java and based on Eclipse platform.

The community edition (CE) of DBeaver is a free and open source software that is
distributed under the Apache License. A closed-source enterprise edition of DBeaver
is distributed under a commercial license.

4.10 Tableau

Tableau Software is an interactive data visualization software company[4] founded on

January 2003 by Christian Chabot, Pat Hanrahan and Chris Stolte, in Mountain View,
California. The company is currently headquartered in Seattle, Washington, United
States [5] focused on business intelligence[6]. On June 10,
2019, Salesforce.com announced it would be acquiring Tableau.[7]

Chabot, Hanrahan and Stolte were researchers at the Department of Computer

Science at Stanford University[8] who specialized in visualization techniques for
exploring and analysing relational databases and data cubes.[9] The company was
started as a commercial outlet for research produced at Stanford between 1999-2002.

Tableau products query relational databases, online analytical processing cubes, cloud
databases, and spreadsheets to generate graph-type data visualizations. The products
can also extract, store, and retrieve data from an in-memory data engine.

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 5. RESULTS

Six months duration is a lot of time and in this time, I learnt a lot, gained many new skills and
got all the relevant industry experience. All the projects given to me were completed within the
deadlines and were hugely successful. Since I interned in a startup, I got to work in many
verticals and gained a lot of experience. Different types of projects returned different types of
results for the teams and the company as a whole but overall the projects were successful. Some
of them were totally new projects started in the company and I was grateful that got a chance
to be part of those projects.

The results of my projects and work programmes were as follows – (all the data is sold data)

5.1 Digital marketing

• Over a span of 6 months, I worked on several projects and all of them were completed
on time and were quite successful. I worked specifically on google ads, Bing ads,
Facebook ads which all come under performance marketing. Apart from these, I also
got some hands-on experience on other areas of digital marketing including but not
limited to affiliate marketing, retention (CRM) and trivago intelligence. So, in all, I
covered the all the dimensions of digital marketing.

• Firstly, talking about google ads, during the course of 6 months the overall spend and
revenue increased from the google ads account significantly as the transactions had to
be scaled for meeting the targets.

• The total number of campaigns increased from 800 at the start of my internship to
almost 1600 at the end of my internship, all created and managed by me. So, the budget
allocation increased and the complexity also increased.

• The total spends of the account increased by more than 20% in which the contribution
of the app campaigns was around 75%. The spend on the search campaigns was reduced
later as more people are moving to mobile and the future is also mobile.

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• The overall CIR decreased from 35% to 30%. This decrease is quite significant when
taking into account that transactions were scaled and there was competitive spending
on search and app campaigns.

• The CIR of the search campaigns decreased from 40% to 20%. This drastic decrease
was due to the optimization efforts carried out by me as well as the reduction in the
spend on search campaigns later on so as to compensate for the increased spending on
the app campaigns.

• The overall hygiene of the account was well maintained throughout the internship and
the account became even well-organized than before with minimal errors in spite of the
fact that the campaigns almost doubled.

• The overall transactions increased by 150% in which the contribution of the search
campaigns was 50%.

• The visibility of the FabHotels brand increased significantly which was due to the
efforts put on SEM (search engine marketing). Due to SEM, the conversions of other
channels like organic, trivago, direct, app, GHA, CRM also increased as more focus
was on user acquisition. This happened because google ads increases the visibility of a
brand. Users who just see our ad and don’t click or transact got to know about FabHotels
and then maybe later on converted through some other channel or medium. This is also
called attribution.

• A very successful campaign was the app install campaign in which the target was to
achieve 1 million app installs on google play store. Ads were run which prompted users
to install the app. The google ads campaign along with Facebook ads was successful in
achieving this goal in a short period of time. The app also became no. 3 trending in the
travel category.

• The total revenue from google ads increased by 30% during these 6 months. To give a
fair idea about the revenue, it was in crores.

• The average ad rank was better than the competitors of FabHotels including Oyo, treebo
etc.

• Due to the maintenance of a good hygiene, the quality score of majorities of the
keywords was more than 8 with a good proportion of that having quality score of 10.

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 • The automation techniques were able to reduce the time spent on operational work by
90%. (note that automation was done only for search queries).

• Bing ads were also started which also comes under SEM. For that, the complete google
accounts data was imported into Bing ads platform using an in-built feature. Though
the traffic in Bing is very less as compared to google, still it has a huge scope.

• The organic traffic and transactions through Bing increased significantly mainly due to
the Bing ads campaigns.

5.2 Airbnb (OTA)

• Scaling Airbnb was a new project and it was a huge opportunity to start this new channel
and start generating revenue from it. Due to the success of other OTAs like
booking.com, yatra.com, easymytrip.com etc., a new team was set up for Airbnb and I
was given the opportunity to be part of this project. Airbnb has huge potential in the
Indian markets especially in the leisure cities (like hill stations, coastal areas etc.). This
project was on a trial basis and the results were good. Revenue started coming from the
leisure cities mainly and other cities were also being optimized.

• I was given 15 properties across 7 cities. The major contributor was Kodaikanal (6
properties). Room nights started coming from the first week itself and in the subsequent
few weeks, the ranking of the properties also improved in the Airbnb platform in spite
of the fact that there is huge competition in the leisure cities.

• One of the targets was to achieve the status of superhost for the Airbnb account.
Superhost status is the status given to Airbnb accounts having overall rating of at least
4.8. This target was achieved in 2 months after starting the account from scratch.

• After the account reached an optimal level, five daily room nights starting coming from
my account which was a significant achievement. Since, this was a new project, there
was not much pressure on how many room nights to achieve. In the initial phase of the
project where time was spent on listings, content optimization, account set up, the
progress was slow but later on when the account became well optimized and the
rankings of the properties improved, a good number of room nights started coming.

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 6. REVIEW

• The overall experience doing my internship at FabHotels was a very enriching,

knowledgeable, beneficial and enjoyable. I learnt a lot about the work in the industry,
gained a lot of skills covering different verticals in a business and also gained a lot of
experience in the hospitality industry. I also got to learn about how a company works
especially a startup where there are many challenges and the growth of the company is
exponential. This experience was very different from what I could have expected in a
large corporation. I gained professional experience and a professional mindset as well.

• Working in a startup is quite different from working in a large multinational

corporation. Startups have majority of young people who have a positive and
multidimensional attitude and are open to challenges and fast paced growth. The open-
door policy in a startup is also one of the striking features of working in a startup. We
get full ownership of our work and full responsibility even if you are an intern. The
people here are helpful and are willing to guide you. We get to learn and work in many
different teams here. People here are multitasking and manage multiple projects at once.
Since being a small company, things are less organized here but that’s why it is a
startup. In the long term, things get organized as a company expands and becomes a big
corporation. Same was the case at FabHotels. It has a very good work culture, talented
people, a very good leadership and is progressing very fast. Working here is very
valuable for an individual as well as the company.

• The major part of my internship was spent in digital marketing. Digital marketing is a
thing of the present and the future. It has reshaped the way marketing is done. It has a
huge scope in the future and is already one of the most trending and most sought after
jobs. This is because more and more people are going digital and it is very important
for a business to have a digital presence. Digital marketing has taken over traditional
marketing and businesses all over the world are heavily spending on digital marketing
to connect with customers and drive revenue from there. The majority of the revenue
at FabHotels came from digital marketing itself. It is a very promising field and is one
of the most desired skills right now.

• Working in the OTA team, I got hands on experience on a new and challenging project.
There was complete ownership and it was like running my own business.

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 7. CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE SCOPE OF WORK

• Overall, the internship experience was very beneficial for me and also for the company.
The amount of time spent and the hard work done in the project gave results which
were very favourable to the team. The results also show that the projects were
successful and since this was a business internship, it directly impacted the business of
the company.

• All the projects, be it small or big, were completed within deadline specified which was
only possible due to proper planning and organized way of work. I also worked on the
targets which was challenging and much more important than the routine project work.
The fast pace of work was sometimes daunting but with the guidance of my mentor and
fellow colleagues, things became easy.

• I have learnt the skills related to search engine marketing, user acquisition, retention
marketing, performance marketing and all these skills are applicable to any industry or
any company as digital marketing is now one of the biggest things in the industry and
every company and business uses digital marketing to scale up its business. Many
companies have dedicated in house teams of digital marketing. Also, there are a lot of
digital marketing start-ups and agencies which work for their clients.

• Concluding, I am very satisfied by the guidance provided by the mentors towards

learning od new concepts and the work culture in the company.

• There is a great future scope of digital marketing and online travel agencies. I have
gained skills which are relevant to any industry (digital marketing) and also the skills
are specifically for the hospitality and hotels industry (OTA).

• Hospitality and hotel industry are a very fast growing multi-billion-dollar industry and
the organized sector still has a low market presence which provides a huge opportunity
for the main market players and also new players to come. There can never be a
monopoly in this industry and there is always scope for new competitors.

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 • Though there has been a lot of advancement in Marketing with Digital Sources, but
there is always scope for more. Below are the advancements that can help the Search
Engine Marketing & OTA work really simple & efficient.

7.1 Automation & Artificial Intelligence:

To achieve growth goals? One of the main ways is through personalization, AI is really
beneficial in that. How you put AI to work for your digital marketing portfolio depends on your
goals and your channels. Apart from this leading to more sales, using AI can also help you
improve your customer service. Businesses can now personalize their marketing to each lead
to turn them from a marketing qualified lead (MQL) to a sale qualified lead (SQL).

Despite the obvious benefits of AI to businesses, very few businesses are currently using it.
For instance, in the same survey by IDC, 83% of marketers are aware of AI but only 14% have
implemented it into their marketing strategies.

AI meta-analysis of broad-spectrum data sets and then using that data to make its own
decisions. We’ll continue to see it being used in a range of up-and-coming marketing
applications, including content creation, voice and face recognition, chatbots, digital assistants,
and highly targeted marketing strategies.

Marketing automation has been a trend for a few years now. But it’s a trend that will continue
to grow in 2019 because of its many benefits including:

• It eliminates time wastage: If your marketing representatives have to manually copy

lead information, then they’re spending precious time they could have used to contact
more leads- wasting man hours and money.
• It minimizes error: Your marketing reps are humans that can forget to copy a lead’s
contact details or call them. Marketing automation software has all the records and can
send alerts to help your people stay on track.
• Marketing automation increases collaboration: One of the main issues with businesses
today is a lack of collaboration between the marketing and sales department. Lack of
collaboration means the sales department don’t get all the details they need about a lead
from marketing and vice versa. Marketing automation software makes all the

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 information about a lead or customer available to any department that needs it,
eliminating silos.

7.2 AdWords API & RAdwords:

An advanced feature that lets advertisers interact with and make changes to their Google
Ads account through applications they create. The AdWords API will be replaced by the
newer Google Ads API, which is currently in beta.

FIG. 7.1 - RADWORDS

• The AdWords and Google Ads APIs (application programming interface)

allow developers to create and use applications that interact directly with their account
details on the Google Ads server.
• These APIs can help advertisers efficiently manage large Google Ads accounts and
campaigns. For example, you can compile your Google Ads data to use with other
systems like inventories, generate regular reports, and make campaign adjustments in
bulk.
• To use either API, you'll need a Google Ads manager account and a developer token.
• These APIs are a good option for advertisers who have a developer or programmer with
technical skills. RAdwords is a R package with the aim to load Adwords data into R.
Therefore, the package implements three main features. First, the package provides
an authentication process for R with the Adwords API via OAUTH2. Second, the
package offers an interface to apply the Adwords query language in R and query the
Adwords API with ad-hoc reports. Third, the received data are transformed into
suitable data formats for further data processing and data analysis.

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7.3 Augmented Reality or Virtual Reality

How powerful will your marketing be if your prospects can test your product right now before
making any commitment? You can eliminate most of the risk that prospects take when they
decide to buy your product for the first time.

Using augmented/virtual reality to release your product ensures that there’s no risk on your
prospect’s part and shows that you are ahead of the game.
Here’s a breakdown between the two:

Augmented reality inserts objects into a real-life setting. This allows people to add an item to
an environment and see how it will look like when the object is included in it.

Fig. 7.2 – Augmented reality in digital marketing

Virtual reality creates a completely new environment that an individual can experience and
besides using it in games, businesses can also use it for marketing purposes.

AR puts a virtual overlay onto the real world and has a number of potential applications in the
travel industry. A recent survey found that nearly half of all travellers would be interested in
using AR to find out information about interesting sites and attractions.

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 8. IMPEDIMENTS AND DIFFICULTIES FACED

The six months internship experience was good overall but there were a few impediments and
difficulties faced since this was my first professional experience. All these hurdles were of the
basic nature and they couldn’t affect my performance. The team members and other colleagues
played a big role in guiding me and helped me through all the problems faced.

When I joined the company and started my internship, it was a whole new world and definitely
there was a big opportunity for personal and professional growth. But the knowledge and skills
I had at that time were not sufficient for so I had to build my knowledge base and take up some
online courses. The guidance and training provided by my mentor proved crucial and, in a few
weeks, I had gained all the industry and work-related knowledge to start my work. Also,
learning never ends so throughout the course of my internship, I kept learning new things and
skills which were additional. So, the major difficulty was to manage work and learning and
complete the work within the deadlines.

Since, I was working in a startup which has a good work culture but the pace of life and work
in the company was very fast so in the beginning it was seeming difficult to cope up with the
fast and challenging environment. But gradually, I adapted with the environment.

Also, people are responsible for multiple projects and also have to meet targets in time so it
was difficult for them also to spare some time for guidance. There was no organized training
but I had to take the initiative and spend time with the colleagues to learn the work.

Since, being a startup, things were less organized there and I had to work with different teams
and spare some time for meetings for discussion of problems with other teams and also for
teaching them the skills. But this is the case with every startup and gradually when they become
big companies, things tend to become organized.

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