Adwords Adverts should be placed AHEAD OF when bookings are low. This suggests you will require a crystal ball to see into the future to a time when bookings a slipping off, however if you have been trading for a few years, checking the bank statements, Sage, or just the bookings charts will all tell you ROUGHLY when the tourist seasons peak and ebb. There are 12 weeks peak with 6 weeks either side that could be 100% occupancy. Then Easter, Christmas and New Year. Also Spring Breaks (April) on short sell and similarly Autumn Gold mini breaks. Outside of these well established EASY times are the more difficult sells and you will need a “sharp” price or large incentive to get people to book. Once you have established what to offer to get people to come (skiing, whisky festival, jazz weekend, taichi and yoga weekend, book festival, golf, kayaking, gay weekends etc) you can think about constructing your adword advert and HOW MUCH you want to allocate as a budget.
For those who are unfamiliar with Adwords and PPC here is how Wikipedia describes it …
Google AdWords is an online advertising service that places advertising copy at the top or bottom of, or beside, the list of results Google displays for a particular search query. The choice and placement of the ads is based in part on a proprietary determination of the relevance of the search query to the advertising copy.
AdWords offers pay-per-click, that is, cost-per-click (CPC) advertising, cost-per-thousand-impressions or cost-per-mille (CPM) advertising, and site-targeted advertising for text, banner, and rich-media ads.
The AdWords program includes local, national, and international distribution.
Google’s text advertisements are short, consisting of one headline of 25 characters and two additional text lines of 35 characters each. Image ads can be one of several different Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) standard sizes.
Use KEYWORDS in the advert and avoid BEST, CHEAPEST etc in the ad as Google wont place it unless under exceptional circumstances. Using popular keywords will get your ad placed lots of times, however because these keywords are sought after by all the other accommodation advertisers, they are VERY costly per click in low bookings times of the year.
Your ad should grab attention and give a reason to click.
Your adwords campaign should be measured and clicks on specific ads counted to see which ones work and which ones dont. The results when analysed should reveal which ads are worth money and generate bookings – and which ones are just time costly time-wasters.
Adwords design and the placing thereof is an art and as such you may wish to get help the first time or two you place ads.
Note well .. that EVERYONE else is placing ads in the low seasons to boost bookings so competition for the best slots and keywords will be touch (expensive)
ADWORDS is a large and complex subject so you should try it out on a small scale and then read about it on-line and watch a few videos. Google themselves provide some of the best learning materials as of course they WANT you to learn how to do Adwords and generate revenue for them. Adwords by Google Link