And then the last thing, so it’s about content aggregating, bringing what’s really relevant for users into their mind when it’s relevant. And then the last one where we’re excited about where we have put a team on is natural language search. Everybody that is in the search field certainly is thinking about conversational search and how you create a different experience for the user and that’s what we have built core models on. How do we not use city plus date and region and like aesthetic data infrastructure, but rather a free search environment that gives you a list of hotels. And we call this natural language search that we’re exploring, but it’s super early in our space. But I think we can expect everybody in the search space including us will find ways of use cases where we make the search results more relevant through that.
And machine learning and AI we’ve used for a long time in showing more relevant search results already. But improving our search, showing more relevant content, leveraging it in marketing, that’s a focus for us.
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Ron Josey of Citi. Your line is open.
Ron Josey: I wanted to ask, Johannes, if you talked a little you talked about, trivago’s second price auction test and plan to launch here shortly. Talk to us a little more about the results that you’re seeing from the testing there and what makes you feel confident about moving forward here in launching that? And can you just provide some additional thoughts on just the DNA and the DSA and some of the newer rules or regulations regarding the gatekeepers and maybe how trivago is positioned here? Thank you very much.
Johannes Thomas: Thank you for your question. Maybe the SPA part, I think it has been a very big project for us. We have been working on this now for about nine months, great effort. And this is a work with our partners internally quite complex infrastructure change. And we have rolled this out in record speeds and very consistently. And we are seeing that the intentions were twofold. On the one hand, we want to improve our search results. In a first price auction, you have the problem when advertisers bid up, the hotel gets pushed up in the ranking very fast. And that means you can pay hotels up the ranking and then that means that not the best hotels are in front of users’ minds. And at a second price auction, this is milder.
We have a more stable search results. That’s the expectation over time with indication that we get there. And that has been an important qualification. Are we improving the user experience? And that’s what we want to see. And the second part, our partners are working on Google on other marketing channels in the second price auction. So, we simplify the world, so they only need to think about first and second price and we make it more simple for them. Also, when you bid in a second price auction, you don’t have risk of overbidding and don’t need to bid down to understand who’s this next highest bidder. So, you maybe are overpaying in the auction. That risk is gone, which means the marketplace overall becomes more efficient and also medium-sized players can be more aggressive without huge economic risk.
So that is I think on the expectations. We see both signals on the user side and the feedback we get from our partners that they are satisfied with how things are going, with how they are steering our auction. And then when you get to the tipping point where partners are excited, we see the right results on our user end, that’s when we want to push the pedal. We want to be done by end of the month ideally, but complexities there. So, there’s a little bit of room. Before summer, we want to be out, so auctions normalize and partners and we have a new normal that we all feel good in and can optimize with forward. And that’s it on the SBA. The DMA I commented on it. That is something where you have seen now a new reality in Google where this is now being assessed by the commission and we will find out what the commission is happy with and what’s not.
And overall, we see less entry points in Europe into GHA. So, their hotel product from our perspective has been weakened and that’s good for us in the long-term. In the short-term, it’s still a headwind that they put PPAs more visible and PPAs for us not converting as well as text ads did. And that’s I think would be interesting. We look at it as hard to predict where this is going. We know they are experimenting further. They have other types of formats that they will be testing. So, it’s volatile and hard to predict where this normalizes. And we are learning fast and how to find our sweet spot in this game. I think given we focus on brand and it’s less relevant for us already because it has been happened for a while and we now see the traction in brand we aim this to offset.
And then it would rather be an opportunity that we can dive into if we are excited about the dynamics in that space.
Ron Josey: Very helpful. Thank you, John.
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Brian Fitzgerald of Wells Fargo. Your line is open.
Brian Fitzgerald: In the prepared remarks, you mentioned that branded traffic volumes are growing nicely in Develop Europe, Rest of World, but not so much in Latin America. To what extent is that a function of you running material different campaigns or is it just the timing in the markets there? Anything different with respect to Latin America with regard to branded campaigns?
Johannes Thomas: That is, I think we in Latin America we have strategically not focused on at the beginning of the year and the reason was that the levels of optimization and the focus we put there were not at the levels we liked. So, you are trying to find out where you have the best dynamics across the globe and where you want to invest your money. And that was not the place where we had seen the returns. We wanted to, we quickly stopped investing in those markets to be able to invest into markets with more elasticity.
Brian Fitzgerald: Thank you.
Operator: [Operator Instructions]. Your next question comes from the line of Doug Anmuth of JPMorgan. Your line is open.
