This article is written for PPC beginners who want a simple, practical way to test Hotel Tech Report’s PPC campaign without wasting budget or drawing the wrong conclusions. If you’ve ever thought “let’s just try a small test and see what happens” or “we tried PPC before and it didn’t work,” this guide is for you.
The goal isn’t to turn you into a PPC expert — it’s to help you run a straightforward test that’s set up for success so you can confidently answer one question: does HTR PPC work for our business?
Step | Why Its Important |
A proper test needs enough budget to generate material clicks across multiple auctions to be significant | |
Your test will only yield results and data in the auctions you bid on during your test | |
Driving traffic to landing pages that don't match buyer intent or aren't optimized for conversion kill your conversion and set your test up to fail | |
Follow a staged plan to gradually test different auctions until you gather enough data to measure and benchmark effectiveness of each auction |
Want HTR run and optimize your PPC test for you? Learn more
1. Set your budget based on a conservative and easy to measure goal
A good starting point is to budget 50% the lifetime value (LTV) of a single 100-room (you can find in your Lead Inbox in the vendor dashboard shown here).
This sets up your 6-month test to have a clear and simple 🎯 objective 👉 all you need to do is convert a single 100-room hotel during your entire 6-month test campaign to generate a 2x ROI.
Step 1: Check your vendor dashboard to determine lifetime value (CLTV) of an average 100-room hotel for your company (shown here)
Step 2: Multiply CLTV from step 1 by x 50% to get your (minimum) PPC test budget
Step 3: Divide your PPC test budget by 6-months to get your monthly PPC budget for the 6-month test
Key Takeaways
✅ Set a conservative budget for a 6-month test to run across multiple auctions to figure out which perform best for you
✅ Have enough budget to generate enough clicks to be statistically significant and generate conversions
✅ Clear and conservative ROI thesis: Convert a single 100-room hotel lead from the leads generated during your 6-month test
🎯 Test Objective
Run a conservative, low-risk test over a long enough period to determine whether HTR PPC can pay for itself.
EXAMPLE SCENARIO
EXAMPLE SCENARIO
Assumptions: Lets assume your average revenue per customer for a 100-room hotel is $3/room/mo ($300/mo) and your average lifetime of a customer is 3-years before they churn (36-months).
Step 1: Check the dashboard (shown here) for the lifetime value (CLTV) of an average 100-room hotel for your company 👉 $10,800 (you can check this in the vendor dashboard here)
Step 2: Multiply CLTV from step 1 by x 50% to get your (minimum) PPC test budget 👉 $10,800 x 50% = $5,400
Step 3: Divide your PPC test budget by 6-months to get your monthly PPC budget for the 3-month test 👉 $5,400 / 6-months = $900/mo
🚨 Why 6-months? You need to run at least a 6-month test to account for seasonality and more importantly to see leads through conversion since average sales cycles are typically 6-18 months depending on your category (which means even a 6-month test is on the low side to expect leads from month 1 to convert into closed deals by month 6...)
Already running PPC campaigns on another channel like Linkedin or Google? Split your budget for a 6-month period with half going to HTR and half remaining on your existing channel to have a direct comparison to benchmark your conversion quality, cost per lead and ROI.
2. Select which auctions you want to test
The first thing you want to do is review the types of auctions so you understand what each option is and which are best for your business (Note: by default only relevant auctions will appear in your dashboard).
The best thing to do is diversify and try as many relevant auctions as possible during your test so you can quickly find out which perform best for you. By best we mean:
Which campaigns had the highest conversion rate?
Which had the lowest cost per lead?
Which generated the highest quality leads/conversions?
If you'd like advice about which auctions are best fit for your business based on your products, goals and budget -- reach out via the live chat to request a personalized plan to make sure your test is setup for success.
👉 3 questions to help you determine which auctions to run your test in:
👉 3 questions to help you determine which auctions to run your test in:
Question | Sample placement |
1. Which category auctions do you want to test?Generate high intent clicks from the PPC container on specific categories of the site as well as other in-category placements (ex. profiles, comparisons, alternatives, etc).
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2. Which department auctions do you want to test?Promote your brand across relevant locations related to your target department to generate visibility and leads with your target buyers.
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3. Which global auctions do you want to test?Reach more buyers by promote your brand, products and content to hotel tech buyers browsing the site in non-category or department specific placements.
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KEY TAKEAWAY: Your test will only yield results in the auctions you run it in
For example, if you run a test only in a category auction this won't tell you anything about how the home page auction would perform for you. Even running a test in one department (ex. Marketing Professionals Auction) won't tell you anything about how another department auction (ex. Operations Professionals) will perform for you.
3. Create targeted landing pages, UTM tracking links and conversion forms for each auction
This is BY FAR THE SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT STEP. It is absolutely critical that you:
✅ CRITICAL STEP | COMMON MISTAKES |
Create landing pages that have targeted messaging for each auction you want to test | Sending all PPC campaigns to a single generic landing page causes the following issues:
❌ Messaging isn't tailored to user intent (aka what they're looking for) ❌ Can't tell which conversions came from which campaigns ❌ Can't tell which auctions performed best ❌ Can't iterate over time to optimize messaging for a specific auction |
Make sure your PPC landing pages follow PPC conversion best practices | Using an existing page on your website that isn't PPC optimized will kill your conversion, leads and ROI potential.
❌ PPC optimized landing pages convert at 15-20% ❌ If your landing page converts <15% you have a leaky funnel and are throwing money down the drain
Example: Lets say you generate 200 clicks in your test. If you use a non-ppc optimized generic landing page that converts at 5% you'll generate 10 leads. If you use a PPC optimized landing page that converts at 20% you'll generate 40 leads on the same spend. |
Implement proper tracking with UTM links and dedicated forms so you can easily (and clearly) measure | Funneling your PPC clicks to a landing page with out tracking setup means you'll have no way to know which
❌ No way to know which leads came from which campaigns ❌ No way to measure and compare cost per lead ❌ No way to validate your clicks |
Step 4: Activate, monitor and optimize your campaigns
Once you have your target monthly budget and you know which auctions you want to test, the next step is to activate your campaigns.
While the optimal strategy will vary by company, auctions you're testing, budget and competitiveness across each auction depending on when you launch your campaign, below is a general high level recommendation for how to strategically run your test and deploy your budget.
If you'd like a more personalized plan, reach out via the live chat on site and our team will prepare one for you at no charge and/or offer to hop on a quick PPC onboarding call to answer any questions and walk you through how to maximize ROI from your test.
Month | Focus auctions | Target Position | Budget allocation |
Month 1 | 1-2 top priority category auctions 1-2 top priority department auctions
| Top 3 Top 1 | 30% |
Month 2 | Global auctions: Home page, newsletter, site takeover, ebook
| Top 3-5 | 20% |
Month 3-6 | Adjust your bids and positions based on what performed best. Questions to ask to determine 'best':
If you aren't sure how to optimize, reach out to our team via the live chat on site and we'll give you step by step instructions to maximize click volumes while staying under your target budget or request info about HTR's "done for you" managed PPC campaigns. | Custom based on results from months 1 and 2 | 25% |
FAQs
a. What are best practices for a successful PPC test?
If your test is too small to answer which auction works best and whether PPC pays for itself, it’s too small.
Best Practice | Why it matters |
test multiple auctions | Every auction behaves differently. You won’t know what works best unless you test more than one. |
ensure a large enough sample size | A handful of clicks can’t tell you anything meaningful. Volume matters. |
set clear success metrics | You need to know what breakeven and success look like before you spend. |
implement proper tracking | If you can’t attribute leads and deals back to HTR PPC, you can’t measure ROI. |
b. Why low-budget PPC tests are problematic
Running PPC with too little budget (<$1,000/mo) most of the time won't allow you to run a proper test of PPC because you won't be able to test multiple auctions to see which performs best for you and/or you don't generate enough clicks to assess performance (ie. if your landing page CTR is 10% and you drive 9 clicks to it...you wouldn't expect to generate a conversion).
Test objective | What goes wrong with too little budget |
Test multiple auctions | ❌ You only test one placement and miss others that could perform better |
Generate enough clicks | ❌ Click volume is too low to judge performance |
Define breakeven | ❌ You don’t generate enough clicks to reach breakeven (or it takes you many months) |
c. Why is the recommended goal of a PPC test to only generate a single closed deal?
This is a hyper conservative goal to simplify answering the question of "did we generate a positive ROI from our spend on our PPC test campaign.
The reason we advise a minimum budget of 50% of CLTV for a single 100-room hotel is because in order to answer this question (and generate a positive ROI), all you need to do to during the 6-month test period is convert a single 100-room hotel lead from your campaigns to generate a 2x ROI.
Needless to say your campaigns should generate significantly more than this but this number is just to set a simple expectation and target for breakeven and positive ROI.