In today’s digital age, people turn to social media to find trip inspirations. According to Adweek, 30% of US travelers go on social media to find inspiration. Also, social media is where many travelers hear about new brands and destinations for the first time. They might not be searching for specific information, but they see the content on their feed. Knowing this, brands can capitalize on the popularity of social media to inspire future travel.
When making travel decisions on social media, the behavior is primarily driven on mobile. Today, smartphones serve as the gateway to travel information for many consumers, with 42% of consumers use their phones to research trips. However, it’s not just research that is done on social, but also bookings; of the travelers who’ve researched their trips, 38% have booked on mobile. Travelers who booked on mobile liked that it saved time and they can do it anytime and anywhere.
With this in mind, Facebook & Instagram are the platforms where it can reach consumers on all stages of their travel decision making journey. According to a Facebook study, travelers spend 5x more time on Facebook than on travel-related apps, sites, and searches.
This level of exposure represents an essential opportunity for hotels and other businesses to engage potential guests with relevant content during their research period; an opportunity further boosted with Facebook’s Hotel Ads.
What Are Facebook Hotel Ads?
Facebook Hotel Ads offers hotels a way to reach different audiences at various stages in their booking process with customized messages, helping to drive early attention and boost direct bookings. The ads can deliver a higher ROAS (Return on Ad Spending) than standard retargeting, making them an invaluable resource for all hotel marketers.
Hotel ads let’s travel and hotel companies automatically show ads across Facebook, Instagram, and Audience Network to people who are likely to take a trip. If someone was browsing on your site but didn’t make a booking– travel ads let the hotels target them with relevant ads based on their specific dates, destinations, and other trip details. And if someone hasn’t visited a hotel site, but have shown interest in a destination through their web browsing, travel ads let you target them as well.
The Travel Ads uses dynamic retargeting ads that are different than standard retargeting as they let hotels target users with ads based on the actions they’ve taken on their site, their stay dates, room types, and other more specific details that they may have provided. Hotels can even offer upgrades or different related experiences to people who have already booked a hotel.
The ads pull in copy with dynamic values using real-time data from the hotel site (such as the daily rate, number of visitors, and stay dates) because these ads feature highly relevant information, which means higher conversion rates and more ROAS for the businesses. See an example of an ad below.
How Hotel Ads can generate efficient hotel bookings?
Maximize the impact of your ad spend
A hotel’s budget is spent more efficiently as the ads are only served to people who express a high intent to book. Because you can target users based on their booking window, ads were also prevented from reaching people whose desired check-in dates are in the past — thus making ad spend more efficient unnecessarily and reducing unnecessary ad spend.
Target the right audience at the right stage of the booking process
Refined tracking (using Facebook Pixels) allows the marketer to determine which stage users are in the booking process based on the actions they’d taken on the hotel website. With this capability, marketers can create ads with tailored messaging based on each user’s stage.
For example, one could separately target users who had landed on the available rooms page and left the site, and users who had made it to the payment page but left before completing their booking. By differentiating these two audiences and targeting them with different ad copy based on their actions, you can see more conversions.
Upsell and Cross-Sell opportunities
The Hotel Ads targeting capabilities lets marketers set up rules for automatically upselling and cross-selling after the user’s initial purchase, helping them drive higher revenue per traveler. For example, if someone books a room with a hotel during a peak season, the marketers can serve the guest with personalized messages for room upgrades, spa packages, or any other offering.
By serving personalized offers with unique user-specific details, Hotel Ad’s can generate a higher number of conversions than a standard ad.
