In February 2025, Google officially phased out the commission-based CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) model for Google Hotel Ads, which had previously allowed hotels to pay ad fees only when a booking was made. This change was prompted by a shift away from third-party cookies and Google's move towards less reliant strategies. Hotels using the CPA model in Google Hotel Ads had to transition to other bidding strategies, such as CPC (Cost Per Click), to maintain visibility.
Freetobook, which helps hotels manage their Google Hotel Ads, relied on the CPA feature to provide predictable, commission-based pricing to its clients. To continue offering commission-based pricing, Freetobook had to rebuild its CPA offer using CPC. The main challenges involved adapting a technical stack originally built around CPA and minimising the business risks associated with using CPC. Freetobook would now have to front the CPC costs without a guarantee of sufficient bookings to cover them, creating a risk of financial loss as the implementation scaled to thousands of properties. This necessitated careful automation, monitoring, and alert systems.
While implementation details cannot be shared, I led the development of this solution with a team of four engineers. The process unfolded in distinct phases: simulation, prototyping and testing, and final solution implementation with staged releases and monitoring. This required understanding various parts of the technical stack, Google APIs, and implementing new logging systems to surface previously unavailable information. Different CPC strategies were developed, and a learning algorithm was created to dynamically select the best strategy for each property.
All of this was achieved in a fractional role, dedicating only half a day per week to the company for this project. Progress was driven by highly collaborative all-hands meetings with clearly defined weekly goals. I also contributed code samples and tutorials to accelerate team learning and anticipate key decisions through data-driven analysis.
