• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, May 27, 2021

Travel- and tourism-related businesses expect a dramatic increase in search volume and bookings due to the pent-up demand to get out of town.

Google announced several travel ads products and updates today at Google Marketing Livestream.

They focus on the increase in travel- and tourism-related searched the company sees. Google searches for “beach rentals” and “staycations” grew by more than 100% globally since last year. As a result, Google Ads now includes vacation rental listings in the Hotel results page.

Hotel ads appear when a traveler searches for a hotel on Search or Maps. These ads appear in a hotel booking module that can show photos of the hotel, amenities, prices, and a link to book the hotel.

Google is launching today three new products to help companies capture the pent-up demand from not traveling.

Hotel booking extensions improve on the possibility that an advertiser’s search campaigns will be seen. The feature is in an open beta for advertisers globally.

Vacation rentals on the Hotel results page for a given destination are also now generally available to advertisers globally. Google enhanced commissions bidding to make it easier for advertisers to find more qualified customers at a lower cost.

Google also made updates to commissions (per stay) reporting, support and billing.  Last year, Google introduced commissions (per stay), meaning advertisers don’t pay for canceled reservations. Travel advertisers only pay for those customers who stay.

And with the uptick of online advertising and services related to travel, advertisers in the market are seeing increased rates of fraud and brand suitability incidents and lower rates of viewability compared with other industries, year-over-year.

The fraud insights from ad verification company DoubleVerify found travel and hospitality ads are a key target for ad fraud. In fact, DoubleVerify found a 20% higher post-bid fraud rate for travel and hospitality advertisers compared with all other major industries between January 2020 and January 2021.

Bot fraud is driving the fraud rates for travel and hospitality advertisers. It was responsible for more than two-thirds of the overall video fraud across travel and hospitality. This is the highest rate of bot fraud for all verticals.