This month we rolled out updates that enable you to promote more than just point solutions via the PPC auction.  

TL;DR: Department Auction Updates

• Platform vs Point Solution.  You can now toggle on Platform Promotion in the department auctions to advertise your full suite of products across department pages—perfect for vendors offering an integrated tech stack.
• New Featured Products Accordion.  Department auctions now have a new featured products accordion placement to highlight the top 6 bidders in the auction.
• Top Bidder Visibility. The top bidder in each department auction now gets enhanced visibility with an expanded state that shows large product imagery, product capabilities and more to drive even more visibility, brand awareness, clicks and performance.

In addition to these department auction updates, the Newsletter Auction now has its own tab in the PPC dashboard to make it easier to find and manage your newsletter campaigns.

Ever wish it was easier to monitor how your PPC campaigns are pacing relative to your target budget?

The new budget pacer will monitor and forecast your month end spend pace and compare it to your budget.

• Pacing behind? The Budget Utilization Alert will appear to let you know that your campaign is forecasted to under deliver (ie. based on current bids you won't be able to deploy your full budget)
• Pacing ahead? The Low Budget Alert will appear to give you a forecast of what you'd need to increase your monthly budget to in order to prevent your budget from running out mid-month and your campaigns getting disabled

Budget pacing alerts instantly do the math on the fly for you so you can just monitor your dashboard to quickly check in on how your campaigns are pacing relative to your budget and gives you actionable tips of how to optimize your bids and budget to generate the most amount of clicks and leads.

Since launching the new dynamic PPC auction for the Home Page + Newsletter placement (Jan '25 Update) , we have had lots of vendors inquiring about just advertising in one or the other.  

As such, we have decided to split these into two distinct auctions allowing advertisers to be able to bid on each separately.

If you had an active bid in the Home Page + Newsletter auction your settings (bid amount and tracking link) have been applied across both of the new auctions to ensure that you continue generating visibility across each.

In addition to splitting out the auctions to make each available individually for enhanced targeting, the Weekly Newsletter is now available for fixed price sponsorships.  Single sends and discounted 4x packs are available which you can learn more about below.

Learn more:

👉 Home Page Auction

👉 Weekly Newsletter Auction

In addition to the core placements for each of the PPC auctions, top bidders will now get an additional boost to performance via additional placements to feature your brand and product and drive even more impressions, clicks and leads to the top bidders in each respective auction.

• Home Page + Newsletter Auction performance boosters 👉 Branded banner + newsletter logo sponsor
• Department Auction performance boosters:  👉 Nav bar and related articles, categories and profiles
• Category Auctions performance boosters 👉 Related comparisons, alternatives, articles and profiles

Today we rolled out a full redesign of the UI and functionality of the software recommendations quiz giving it not only an entirely new look and feel but it now fully integrates AI to help hoteliers save time and make better decisions.

✨ New AI Features

• AI Powered Fit Score: The quiz is now powered by the same AI Fit score algorithm as the Tech Stack Audit tool analyzing millions of data points in seconds to determine each product's fit for a specific hotel.
• AI Content Summarization: AI scans, analyzes and summarizes thousands of reviews, expert recommendations and content to serve up summaries for hoteliers with snippets, citations and sentiment analysis serving as the ultimate tech tools research assistant. 
• AI Topic & Sentiment Analysis: Drill deeper into each recommendation with topic and sentiment analysis to find out what real users from the leading hotel companies mention most about each recommendation while also being able to make more accurate comparisons between products along key buying criteria including: functionality, integrations, support, value/ROI and ease of use.

Since we rolled out AI Enhanced Company Descriptions a few months back we've had several vendors reach out asking how this is generated, what info it pulls from and how it works--which is why we added the new sources and citations element to help both vendors (and hoteliers) understand how this AI generated product description is being generated.

In order to make it easier and more secure for users to access their HTR accounts, as of today we have fully removed passwords from the HTR application and have replaced them with social login and magic link.

By default, if you use a social account that has your current HTR email associated with it you will automatically be linked to that account and logged in right away.  If you try to login using a social account that has a different email address associated than your current HTR account has, it will create a new account since the emails won't match but you can reach out to our team if you need assistance merging these.  Alternatively, you can also use the magic link option to login using your HTR account email.

Today we rolled out a native app in the Zapier App Store to make it easier and more reliable to sync data from leads you generate and accept via the HTR Lead Inbox directly into your own tools.

Check out the tutorial

How it Works

1. In your dashboard go to Leads > CRM Forwarding
2. Click the activate button on the Zapier tile
3. Accept invitation to the private Zapier app 

That's it! You can now integrate any of your tools with one click!

Popular Automation Use Cases

Once you activate the Zapier integration, you can setup any automations you want. Some popular ones include:

• 💌 CRM. Add leads as contacts and create an opportunity

• 🎯 Lead Nurturing. Add leads to an MQL nurture sequence

• 📈 Reporting. Add lead details to a Google Sheet

• 🔔 Notifications. Send a Slack message to your team for new leads

Easily uncover the different ways that you can generate more visibility and leads via Hotel Tech Report.