LateRooms and Booking.com Top Greenlight Search Integrated Search Report for the Hotel Sector

The UK’s leading independent search marketing agency, Greenlight, has released the latest in a series of integrated vertical industry insight reports, this time delving into the highly competitive hotel sector. The report focuses on paid search as well as natural search to offer an in-depth analysis. The results are based on search volumes for September 2009 and refer to visibility on page one of Google’s search results.

This latest report is based on more than 29 million searches that took place in Q3 2009 for 1,300 of the most popular hotel-related terms, including generic and destination-led keywords. This data was then used to rank the most visible sites on page one of Google’s search results.

According to Greenlight’s research, the most visible websites in natural search during September 2009 were LateRooms, PremierInn and Booking.com, reaching 57 per cent, 31 per cent and 31 per cent of the searching audience respectively. Of the top ten sites, eight were agents or aggregators and two were hotel chains; PremierInn and Hilton – a new entrant into the top ten.

The paid search section of the report determines an advertiser’s share of voice based on: how often they appear on Google, which ad position they are bidding for and the search volume generated for the keywords they bid on. The ranking represents visibility across the top 100 keywords in September 2009.

Booking.com has the greatest share of voice in paid search across all keywords reaching 38% of the searching audience. Advertisers’ share of visibility was consistently higher in Q3 than those reported by Greenlight in Q2, which can be attributed to the increase in spend for paid search during the months of July and August during the holiday season. The best performing hotel chain in paid search is Travelodge with 10% share of voice, having taken over Q2’s most visible brand Marriott, left with 4% visibility.

Greenlight Search currently produces quarterly integrated reports on flight, online gaming and hotel sectors. They also cover a broad cross section of industries including insurance, mortgages & loans, credit cards, car hire and finance, amongst others.