Is your hotel already making use of Facebook’s Dynamic Ads? Today we look at how intelligent use of these Dynamic Ads for Travel can better guide website visitors back into the right phase of your direct booking process.
In 2016, Facebook expanded the power of their dynamic ads within the travel sector. These dynamic ads allow businesses to target customers with relevant and personalised advertisements at each stage of the sales funnel. Their benefit extends beyond just targeting though – they also permit you to display specific products that are in the customer’s cart, or that they have recently viewed. Facebook originally developed these ads for retailers to sell items, but are now using them to revolutionise the travel world too.
The ads, designed specifically for travel advertisers, now allow hotels to implement Facebook deeper into their marketing strategy. These Dynamic Ads for Travel (DAT) are Facebook’s solution for hoteliers to reach users who have shown interest in their properties, dates and rates.
By leveraging this technology, hoteliers can not only reach the right users with the correct messaging at the right time, it also intelligently allows them to guide interested customers back into the relevant phases in the customer journey on the hotel website.
What do Dynamics Ads for Travel offer Hoteliers?
DAT benefit from everything that the original dynamic ad format has to offer by allowing hoteliers to show relevant products to the users who have already interacted with their website.
The ads enable hoteliers to promote their hotel in unique ways, minus the hassle of manually setting up a number of individual campaigns – something especially beneficial for chains. Once DAT campaigns are configured and live, you will be continually reaching travellers with the right offer at the right time. As the audience and content are refreshed dynamically, these is no need to pause any live campaigns in order to adjust or recreate them. DAT also allow you to reach travellers on any device they use – providing you with the opportunity to target your website visitors across all devices through use of Facebook’s Pixel technology. Perhaps most importantly for many hotel marketers, DAT’s intelligent targeting makes them relatively cost-effective – hoteliers can ensure they are displaying relevant ads that travellers have shown genuine interest in.
Tailored Technology
DAT is built especially for the travel industry allowing hotels to promote their business to the most relevant audience in an effective way. Prior to DAT, hotels used Dynamic Ads to create automated ads for their property – these were not as successful because the format was developed specifically for e-commerce businesses. Consequently, the targeting and parameters were designed for product marketing and so lacked the detail, differentiators and specificity that would make them invaluable to the travel industry. Therefore, the travel industry had to find ways around this to make dynamic ads to fit their needs and promote their product. With the release of DAT and a focus on intricate travel-based variables, hoteliers now have a powerful tool to target the right people at the right time.
Keeping the flow of your Customer Journey
A particular benefit of using DAT ads when combined with Hotelchamp’s sales and marketing platform is the ability to redirect the traffic to the relevant points in your customer journey. For example, guests that have already entered your booking engine can be specifically targeted and then welcomed back to your website with tailored messaging or offers – a seamless bridge to effortlessly resume the journey through your direct booking process. Data collected on their first visit can also be used to tailor a landing page with prepopulated info, including check-in dates and number of travellers. Just as Dynamic Ads prove in advertising, customisation is becoming a differentiating factor in the hotel website’s customer journey – making it crucial for hotels to serve the right message at the right time during the direct booking process.
Dynamic Pricing and Availability
In the travel industry, prices and availabilities change regularly. One of the key advantages of these types of ads are their ability to support and accurately reflect these fluctuations, providing travellers with the most relevant and up-to-date pricing and availability, therefore increasing the conversion rate.
Of course to fully benefit from these ads you must have high quality product data feed – this means creating a ‘catalog’ data feed to live update information about your inventory, including price, availability and location. For more information about setting up your catalog data feed, Facebook offers a step-by-step guide specifically for hoteliers here.
Narrow and Broad Targeting
Facebook also allows hotels to create specific guidelines for the audience of campaigns. For example, a hotelier can include enough granularity in their targeting so as to only show these ads to “single travellers who have searched for a hotel at least 2 times in the last 15 days but not yet booked”. This detailed control gives hotels more room to bid for the most relevant and valuable people – therefore optimising return on investment in the most efficient method.
At the end of 2017, Facebook also extended DAT’s targeting capabilities to include Broad Audiences. Broad Audiences permit hotels to target travellers who have shown interest in the destination the hotel is located, but haven’t yet been on the hotel website. This also includes targeting people who may have changed their destination preferences. For example if a guest searches for a certain hotel in Hong Kong but then later searched for the same dates in Beijing – Facebook can present the person with an ad for a Hotel of the same chain in Beijing. It’s not only chains that benefit from this – the shift in destination preference will cause Facebook to cease serving ads for the initial destination, saving the Hong Kong hotelier from redundant ad spend.
Facebook’s Dynamic Ads for Travel are the beginning of a whole new chapter in travel advertisements – helping bridge the divide between external marketing efforts and an intelligent customer journey on your website. For more information about how you can optimise your website to maximise the value of this engaged traffic, set up a chat with one of Hotelchamp’s conversion specialists today.
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