We identified and resolved a bug in the PPC Bid Manager that affected the “missed clicks” coaching tip inside the auction bidding modal.

The issue caused inaccurate click uplift forecasts to be displayed when advertisers evaluated moving to a higher position.

This was a forecasting display bug — not a billing issue — and it has now been fully fixed.

Advertisers can now see reliable click uplift projections and visibility gains when evaluating bid adjustments.

1. What Happened

🐛 Bug Identified: 

Inside the PPC Auction Bidding modal, advertisers see a coaching tip designed to estimate how many additional clicks could be generated by increasing bid position.

Due to a logic error in the forecasting layer, the projected click uplift and multiplier shown in that tip did not always reflect the true estimated performance difference between:

• Your current position
• The top auction position
• Actual 30-day historical traffic in your category

In certain cases, the projection understated incremental click opportunity.

This did not impact:

• Actual click delivery
• Campaign performance
• Billing or CPC charges

The issue was limited strictly to the forecast numbers displayed in the bidding modal (see below).

2. What We Fixed

✅ Resolved: The forecasting bug has been corrected.

The missed clicks coaching tip now:

• Accurately calculates incremental click volume between positions
• Uses real auction performance data
• Reflects actual 30-day historical traffic patterns
• Displays reliable click multipliers tied to position changes

When the modal shows a projected multiplier (for example, 1.7x), that number now reflects a true estimate of expected uplift based on recent auction behavior.

3. Why this Matters for You

The bidding modal is designed to surface traffic share opportunity inside your category.

Now that the forecasting bug has been fixed, you can clearly see:

• How much traffic the top position is capturing
• How many incremental clicks may be available at higher rank
• The real projected gain associated with moving up one position
• Whether your current bid is leaving available share unclaimed

In competitive auctions, position differences can materially impact visibility and quality since the highest qualified clickers 

If you have not recently reviewed your position using the updated forecasts, there may be incremental demand available that was previously understated in the modal.

What you should do right now

While no action is required, we strongly recommend opening the PPC Bid Manager and reviewing your current position in the bidding modal to evaluate:

• Updated click uplift projections
• Incremental traffic available at higher rank
• Alignment with your current budget and growth goals

If helpful, your account team can walk through your current positioning and projected uplift using the corrected forecasts.

We're excited to announce a new feature that gives vendors instant visibility into what's impacting their lead generation performance on Hotel Tech Report.

What's New

Starting this month, vendors will see live performance alerts directly in their Lead Inbox when specific issues are affecting their visibility and inbound lead volumes. These alerts appear as coaching tips that help you understand exactly what's holding back your lead generation potential.

How It Works

At the beginning of each month, we automatically analyze your account performance across three critical areas:

1. Product Rankings & Reputation We track how many of your products rank in the top 3 within their respective categories. If any of your products fall outside the top 3, you'll receive an alert explaining how this impacts your visibility with buyers (you can check your reputation and get real time tips to improve in the Reputation Report Card)

2. Targeting Coverage We measure what percentage of available segments you've enabled for Instant Connect across your product categories. If you have less than 50% of segments enabled, you'll see an alert about expanding your targeting to capture more qualified leads.

3. Membership Status We track whether you had an active Premium membership during the month. Premium members receive boosted visibility in non-rank-based locations, which directly impacts your lead generation potential.

What You'll See

When performance issues are detected, you'll notice:

• A clear alert count indicator in your Lead Inbox
• Specific, actionable insights for each issue
• Data showing exactly what's impacting your performance (e.g., "1/1 of your products didn't rank in the top 3")
• The timeframe when these issues occurred

Why This Matters

Previously, vendors had to guess why their lead volumes might be lower than expected. Now, you get proactive coaching on the specific factors affecting your pipeline generation, allowing you to:

• Take immediate action on issues impacting your visibility
• Understand the why behind lead volume fluctuations
• Optimize your strategy based on real performance data
• Maximize your ROI on your Hotel Tech Report presence

Getting Started

This feature is now live for all vendors. Simply navigate to your Lead Inbox to see if any alerts apply to your account. Hover over the alert count to see detailed information about each issue.

NOTE: Alerts will only be available from the month the feature was deployed (beginning Feb '26)

What's Next

This is just the beginning. We're continuously expanding our alerts system to provide even more actionable insights that help you grow your pipeline and close more deals.

Have questions about your alerts? Contact your Hotel Tech Report account manager or reach out to our support team.

The HotelTechReport Leads Program is currently temporarily offline due to a planned transition between email and phone number validation providers.

Why is this happening?

The new Lead Inbox was deployed over the holidays and is now accessible within the vendor dashboard.

Email and phone verification are a critical component of HotelTechReport’s lead moderation process. As part of a routine update to our technology stack, we are transitioning from one validation provider to another. To ensure a clean and reliable changeover, lead delivery has been temporarily paused during this process.

What does this mean for vendors?

During this short transition period:

• New leads will not be delivered
• No leads are being lost or misattributed
• Lead delivery will automatically resume once the transition is complete

When will the leads program be available again?

We expect the Leads Program to be fully operational again within the next few days. No action is required on your end.

We appreciate your understanding that periodic maintenance of our systems is necessary to ensure the continued reliability and high standards of the HotelTechReport leads program. If you have any questions, please contact our team.

The next time you login you'll notice that the Lead Inbox got a fresh redesign including: 

• Redesign of the main lead inbox
• New focused view when new leads are pending
• Enriched lead cards for accepted leads with additional details and activity log
• Live coaching tips to optimize your lead volumes and conversion
• Lead insights tab to show lead segmentation and ROI (Premium feature)

Please note that we have been informed by our file upload provider that their API has been experiencing issues and is currently down which means all users on HTR won't be able to upload files or images until Uploadcare has resolved the issue.

You can monitor the issue and resolution here: https://status.uploadcare.com/

HotelTechAwards: Please note that this will impact ALL participants the same preventing new case studies from being created as well as partner recommendations.  Data will still be frozen and exported from the platform at the 5pm PST cutoff as designated in the competition rules.

Reach buyers right after they take high-intent actions. Our new success-page placements embed PPC auctions into post-review experiences, unlocking a highly efficient way to promote products and monetize key conversion moments.

• Trending Hotel Tech Tools
• Operations Tools
• Revenue Manager Tools
• Guest Experience Tools
• Hotel Marketing Tools

Turn content into clicks. Our new eBook & Webinar PPC auction helps vendors drive low-CPC, high-intent traffic to gated assets—perfect for pipeline creation, not just brand awareness.

Learn more & view placements

Beginning December 1, 2025 HTR will be migrating the Legacy Static Site Takeover format to the New Dynamic Auction Format.  

Comparison of Old vs New Site Takeover Formats

	OLD FORMAT	NEW FORMAT
Ad placement	Exit intent modal (site wide)	Exit intent modal (site wide)
Ad format	Static. Pre-reserve exclusive placement for static 2-week intervals 4-6 months in advance (example)	Dynamic. Bid for placement in the real time PPC auction  (examples)
Example
# of Advertisers	1x advertiser	3 advertisers
Ad type	Promote a piece of content (ebook or webinar)	Promote a product
Pricing	$4,000 per 2-week interval	Real time PPC auction starting @ $15/click
Availability	Reserve 4-6 months in advance	Activate in real time

What challenges does the new auction format solve?

1. Performance based: The old static format was priced based on 2-week reservations which meant one advertiser could pay the same fee who achieved 2x the results and vice versa (since it was a static fee per period).  The new PPC auction ad format changes this entirely by making the ads entirely performance based so you don't pay for impressions or visibility but instead you pay for results (aka interested hoteliers clicking through).
2. Higher intent: The old format promoted content vs the new format promotes products which means the clicks are higher intent clicks (aka more valuable clicks)
3. Full automated process: The old format required companies to submit a piece of content to promote, after which HTR would produce a campaign and send a draft to go through revisions which added work for clients.  The new format promotes products which we already has all of the content you need which eliminates the need for back and forth, campaign production or revisions and means you can set campaigns live instantly with zero effort required.
4. Last minute inventory: Since the old static site takeover had fixed reservations and was limited to a single advertiser, it meant that in order to reserve a campaign you had to purchase and reserve it 4-6 months ahead of time.  Now with the new format, advertisers can activate a campaign in real time via the PPC dashboard and start generating clicks. 
5. More opportunities for advertisers: Since the old static format could only promote a single piece of content with fixed 2-week reservations, it meant there were less than two dozen slots for advertisers many of which got reserved by a single advertiser.  
6. Market based pricing: Compared to the previously static priced legacy site takeover ad campaigns reserved in 2-week increments, the new live auction format unlocks real time pricing based on supply and demand in the market in real time.

What if my company has already reserved a legacy static Site Takeover for after the December 1st migration to the new format? 

For companies who have reserved static/exclusive site takeover campaigns starting December 1, 2025 these campaigns will be converted into PPC credits for you to utilize in the live auction at the dollar value of the legacy site takeover campaigns ($4k per 2-week campaign interval).  Our team will be reaching out to all companies with existing reservations to notify you about the change and confirm that the equivalent credits have been added to your account so that you can utilize them to run Site Takeover Campaigns via the new live auction format.

Today we rolled out a full redesign to the Review Form which included several functional new elements to help improve conversion as well as a full aesthetic redesign including: 

• Redesign: Ground up redesign of the legacy review form
• Verification Options: Social auth verification to make verification even simpler and reduce the need for users to click a verification link sent to their email to boost conversion without losing verification.  We also incorporated magic link for users who don't have an approved professional social login available (Google, Linkedin or Microsoft) to use for verification
• New Start Page: New start page to help mitigate mixups if you send a partner recc link to a hotel customer or vice versa (ex. https://hoteltechreport.com/review/mews)
• Use Case Selection: Rather than ask users which products they use, we instead ask them about the use cases they'd like to review (aka. 'For which purposes do you use {product}' to improve accuracy of product selection and the resulting review's relevance to a specific product and its respective use cases
• Hotel Lookup + Auto-fill: We integrated the dynamic hotel lookup field into the review form to help save time and reduce form fields by pre-filling hotel attributes for users including: region, hotel size and hotel type

Today we rolled out a redesigned Automated Review Manager to make it even easier for Premium Members to collect feedback at scale and optimize their rankings and reputation.