Overbooking or Underbooking? How SEA Can Help You Strike the Perfect Balance

Whether you're in hospitality, dining, automotive services, or any other service industry, managing the delicate balance between supply and demand is a constant challenge. How can you avoid overbooking—leaving customers dissatisfied—or underbooking, which results in lost revenue and wasted resources? The answer may lie in optimizing your Search Engine Advertising (SEA) campaigns.

Tackling the Challenge of Availability Management

Overbooking and underbooking are costly problems for businesses. Overbooking can damage customer satisfaction, erode loyalty, and incur additional expenses like compensation or rebooking. Conversely, underbooking leads to missed revenue opportunities and inefficient use of resources.

So, how can you leverage SEA campaigns to better manage availability and avoid these pitfalls?

A Step-by-Step Solution

Here’s a three-step strategy to integrate your availability data into your SEA campaigns and optimize your management of overbooking and underbooking:

1. Centralize Your Business Data : start by gathering all your availability data—appointments, inventory, capacity, and more—into a single system. This could be a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform, inventory management software, or another tool tailored to your business needs.

2. Create a Scoring System : once your data is centralized, develop a scoring system to evaluate the availability of each product or service. This score can factor in metrics like available appointments, stock levels, and production capacity.

3. Automate Campaign Adjustments : finally, automate your SEA campaigns using your scoring system. This is where product feeds come into play.

Product Feeds: The Key to Dynamic Campaigns

A product feed is a file containing detailed information about your products or services, such as descriptions, prices, and availability. These feeds are updated in real-time and used by SEA platforms like Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising to display your ads.

By integrating your availability data into your feed, you can dynamically adjust your ads based on stock levels or available slots. For instance, you can highlight "In Stock" or "Available for Booking" for items with high availability, while showing "Coming Soon" or "Fully Booked" for those nearing capacity.

You can also customize landing pages to provide alternatives for customers looking to book services that are already full.

Case Study: ATU’s Success with SEA Optimization

Take the example of ATU, a leading automotive maintenance provider in Germany. ATU faced challenges managing availability across its 529 centers—some were underbooked, while others in the same region were overbooked. This imbalance led to missed sales targets in some locations and long wait times for customers in others.

To address this, Keyade, a GroupM France agency, developed a fully dynamic and automated solution. The approach redistributed ATU’s SEA budget and marketing efforts based on real-time appointment availability.

Here’s what the ATU and Keyade teams implemented:

1. Appointment data was centralized into a single system, and each center was assigned a score based on its availability.

2. A dynamic appointment feed connected ATU’s proprietary data to Google Ads.

Two types of campaigns were created:

• Campaigns to promote services with high availability.

• Reduced-bid campaigns for services with low availability.

• Landing pages were customized to pre-filter results by both the center and the service the user searched for.

The Results: In just a few weeks, ATU saw a 38% increase in ROI and a 344% boost in average daily revenue from local service campaigns. Not only did ATU optimize its SEA budget, but it also enhanced the customer experience by offering more relevant appointment slots and reducing wait times.

What’s Next?

The possibilities for optimization are endless. You can extend the use of your availability data to other SEA tools, such as Performance Max for Store Goals, or incorporate additional business metrics like average profit margins per service.

The future of SEA lies in the smart use of your availability data. Don’t wait—start optimizing today!

Are you struggling with overbooking or underbooking? Contact us to learn how we can create a customized SEA strategy tailored to your availability data and business goals!