By Wei Xia (VP of new product and services) and Quentin Moores (VP of marketing Services) of DerbySoft.

Metasearch continues to be one of the hottest topics for the hospitality industry. We have already written two articles about metasearch this year and hosted a webinar with Tnooz to give greater insight to the challenges and solutions available to hoteliers.

The rapid growth and changing landscape of metasearch means that the "old" rules of metasearch marketing no longer apply. Marketers are facing many new problems and dilemmas.

Is metasearch a marketing channel or distribution channel?

Metasearch used to be a simple concept to grasp when it was defined simply as a marketing channel. Now it is getting more complicated. Increasingly, many major metasearch sites like TripAdvisor are promoting booking and payment functions, similar to an OTA, despite many differences.

Many hotel marketers may balk at the idea that a booking would be completed on a metasearch site. To solve this dilemma, we have to step back to understand what the business objective is?

If the ultimate objective is to get more bookings at a reasonable cost, then we should embrace this change. Metasearch is no longer just a marketing channel, nor is it simply an OTA type of distribution channel. Perhaps it should be called a direct distribution-marketing channel, through which you can get bookings from direct customers on your branded site or app?

How much budget should be allocated for metasearch?

Consider this example, recently one of our clients was having a great month, its metasearch traffic and booking volume reached an all time high with a targeted ROI. Then we got a call from the client telling us it had consumed its entire monthly marketing budget for metasearch and asked us to pause its metasearch campaign for the remainder of the month.

In the meantime, OTAs continued to generate and deliver bookings from metasearch and as a result the hotels paid higher commissions, on the same bookings that could have already been generated from our metasearch campaign.

See the article here:

Five questions to help marketers solve the metasearch dilemma