Three hotels increase return on ad spend by 150% with Facebook Travel Ads
Even though hotel marketers know how to use social media marketing to promote brand awareness and engage fans, many don’t know how to effectively leverage it to drive sales. To help hoteliers overcome this challenge, Travel Tripper tapped into the power of Facebook Travel Ads for Hotels (formerly named Dynamic Ads for Travel).
As discussed in our recent post, Facebook Travel Ads engage new and returning visitors who have browsed your hotel’s website by updating the ad copy with real-time data from your booking engine. Personalized ads are then served to users based on their specific search behaviors on your site, such as information relating to their stay dates and room types.
To assess its effectiveness compared with standard retargeting ads, Travel Tripper tested Facebook Travel Ads with three Mid-Atlantic hotels.
Our most effective ad copy and design
Compared to standard retargeting ads that only use generic messaging, Facebook Travel Ads delivers highly tailored ads using customized messaging.
The following three examples show the copy variations we tested for Stewart Hotel in New York City to capture lost sale throughout a visitor’s booking journey. In addition to the best performing ads below, we’re also testing the promotion of exclusive offers to entice the user to return and book direct.
Users who left the site after entering their preferred stay dates on the available rooms page are urged to resume the reservation with a call to action prominently displaying the stay dates at the top of the ad:
If visitors went a step further to select a room but left the site prior to submitting the guest details form, then we would motivate them with a different message like the one below:
For visitors who made it all the way to the hotel’s payment details page but didn’t finish submitting the payment we found the ad copy below performed best:
The results
To determine the full impact of Facebook Travel Ads, we compared how these tailored ads performed compared to standard retargeting campaigns.
The graphic below shows the test results for 1 property when testing over a 3-month period in 2018:
In this 3-month period, the cost-per-conversion for this hotel decreased by 28%, conversion rates increased by 54%, and ROAS increased by 73%.
And things only got better when Facebook Travel Ads was used for an extended period of time. Below, you can see the results when 3 hotels tested Facebook Travel Ads for over six months:
Over this six-month period, Facebook Travel Ads generated 34% more bookings and revenue increased by over $99K for those 3 hotels.
The enhanced targeting capabilities offered by Facebook Travel Ads gave us the ability to serve ads only to users with high intent to book. This enabled us to decrease the CPA by 38%, bringing down the overall Facebook ad spend by 17%.
In conclusion, each hotel saw higher conversion rates with a lower cost-per-conversion. Return on ad spend (ROAS) was also significantly up across the board. Over the six-month period, three hotels achieved an average increase of 150% on ROAS compared to standard retargeting.
****
Interested in learning more? Sign up for our webinar on March 20 to get all the tips and tricks on Facebook Travel Ads from our digital marketing experts!
