In Hotels Combined

Week 4 – Hotels Combined PPC Affiliate Experiment

Posted by: Robert Austin on Nov 21, 2009 | 5 Comments

End of week 4.

Week 2 Expenses:$133.28
Week 2 Commissions: $24.89

Week 1 Profit: -$95.93
Week 2 Profit: -$83.71
Week 3 Profit: -$140.83
Week 4 Profit: -$108.39

Total Profit: -$428.86

hc-week4-adwordshc-week4-performance

Coming close to the end of the experiment. I’ve pretty much stopped all other countries except for Australia, just trying to turn a profit margin again, however small.

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5 Comments

  1. Jem
    February 19, 2011

    Hi Robert,

    I read you report last week with great interest. We also run a PPC campaign with HotelsCombined and it’s also in the test phase. I was really surprised when I read your attempts/results about the CTR at the time.

    We’re running a super super tight campaign on Google, with 100s of negatives, phrase and exact matches, Google search only, english only, desktops only etc and it’s been very difficult. Those 50%-100% conversions appear to be pie in the sky but we’ve only been going with this a few days so I’ll come back to you.

    I just can’t believe how few people click our ads (think 0.2%), we have run many campaigns over the last 10 years so we know how to write great copy, and our other sites have good CTRs. But it seems like the general Google Public do not want to see a Comparison website, even if you genuinely do have the price.

    Perhaps other modes of comparison shopping have put them off over the years? Who knows, but from where I’m standing at the moment, it would not appear that PPC is a valid form of advertising at these $1.00 per book button rates. At least with Pay per Acquisition you can stand to get 8-10% of the total booking value, many hotels, promoted correctly in the longtail can produce good profit margins. But with HC, even if you send a £4,000 booking their way, you’re going to get $2.40 for it.

    Anyway, we’re trying to see if there is any way of making this work, even that means 5p per click, but I have the feeling that the commission offered as just far far too small for such a commitment from a client as pressing book and moving forward to pay.

  2. Robert Austin
    February 19, 2011

    Hi Jem, this experiment is over a year old now but your recent results don’t surprise me. CPC costs have only gone up. My conclusion was the Hotels Combined commission model was inferior to regular % of booking payouts. Their payout was never high enough to make a profit from PPC.

    I’ve no doubt you could achieve higher CTR’s, but to maintain them you will probably have to bid anywhere between $0.70 – $2.00 which wont be profitable.

    I’ve though about their payout model for some time, you basically get $1 or whatever it is for sending someone to the “checkout” (offsite). Maybe if you got $1 for getting them to the Hotels combined comparison screen you would achieve their stated conversion rates of 50%, and it would be profitable.

  3. honey
    August 22, 2011

    hi do they really pay you? i just started on this and im quite excited to receive my commission or whatever u call it…

  4. Ryan
    September 1, 2011

    I am also using Hotelcombined for a few months. But I found it is much better than Google Adsense

  5. Lee
    January 4, 2012

    Hello,

    I am looking for some help with my private brand website. It isa hotelscombined affiliate and we are trying to set up a payper click campaign…however we were denied with google adwords b/c of domain issues…is there a way around this? is PPC a viable way of advertising for a hotelscombined site?

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