INTRODUCTION
Today’s travelers are likely to shop around for the best price or experience before committing to a hotel, which helps explain the 78.3 percent booking abandonment rate on hotel websites.
Retargeting (or remarketing) ads are a powerful way to position your brand in front of people who have already contemplated booking with you. Essentially, the ads follow individuals who’ve visited your website around the internet as they browse other sites, which can help keep your hotel top-of-mind and hopefully drive direct bookings.
Since Google and Facebook have the greatest reach, it makes sense to start on those platforms.
Following are some tips on how you can use Facebook and Google retargeting ads for your hotel, resort or bed and breakfast.
HOW TO CREATE RETARGETING ADS ON FACEBOOK
To get started, install the Facebook pixel on your hotel’s website. This requires inserting a snippet of code from Facebook, so you may need to reach out to your webmaster or site developer for assistance.
Once the pixel is active, it will start collecting data, such as website visits generated from Facebook and its network. From here you should set up standard events such as:
- “View content” to see how many people viewed a specific page (e.g. landing page)
- “Initiate checkout” to track how many people began the booking process
- “Purchase” to track booking confirmations.
You will create custom audiences using this information. For instance, you can design an audience that includes individuals who initiated a checkout without booking the room. Go to Business Manager > Audiences > Create Audience > Custom Audience > Website traffic to select the parameters you want to include (e.g. initiate checkout) and exclude (e.g. purchase).
Your objective is to reach people who have already visited your website. Make sure to use ad language and visuals that are appropriate. In the example above, consider including an incentive to bring them back to your site (e.g. a temporary discount to book).
Facebook also has travel ads (previously “Dynamic ads for travel”) that allow you to automatically show ads to people who have interacted with your website. These types of ads pull information and images from data you provide so that you don’t have to design individual ads.
To implement travel ads, you will need to create a hotel catalog and design a template for your ads. Facebook for developers offers in-depth instructions on how to get started.
HOW TO USE GOOGLE REMARKETING ADS
Like Facebook, Google requires you to install code on your hotel website before you can run Google remarketing ads. Google Ads has a global site tag that should be added to every page (e.g. in the footer section) and optional event snippets to measure specific activities such as purchases (e.g. room bookings).
Once Google has collected enough data, you can create remarketing lists within Audience manager. Do this by selecting the specific tags you have set up, or create the lists based on page visits. For instance, you can remarket to people who viewed a specific type of room (e.g. premium) without booking.
In this example, you would select “Visitors of a page” and “Match every rule group.” Then choose “contains” or “equals” and fill in the URL (or a portion of the URL) associated with premium rooms. Click “and” to set another parameter. This time select “does not equal” and enter the URL of the booking confirmation page to exclude people who made a reservation.
Further refine the list by adding a specific time frame in which they last visited your site and a membership duration. Make sure to add a recognizable description before saving the audience so you can locate it in the future.
Then you can launch a display campaign targeted toward their needs. For example, consider offering a discount or another incentive to book (e.g. free meal).