Facebook Travel Ads were originally built for single-location offers, but today, advertisers are using Facebook to dynamically promote cruises, vacation packages, and other multi-destination travel offerings.
NB: This is an article from Koddi
Included below are some of the most popular questions we’ve received from our clients throughout the onboarding process.
What’s the benefit of using Destination Ads instead of Dynamic Product Ads?
Unlike Dynamic Product Ads, Facebook Travel Ads are able to leverage important travel-related details such as location, booking window, travel dates, number of travelers and more sophisticated targeting for attracting relevant, new audiences.
By providing the viewer with more relevant content, Facebook Travel Ads are the most effective way for travel brands to reach potential customers on Facebook – offering the best ad experiences, the most relevant recommendations and more meaningful interactions based on everything known about that user. For more information about the benefits of switching from DPA to Facebook Travel Ads, check out this blog post.
How does the organization of multi-location trips affect my advertising capabilities?
Just like any other dynamic advertising campaign, Facebook requires one unique id for every possible package that could be advertised. The number of ids depends upon the degree of specificity you’re looking for.
Consider this scenario for a CRUISE LINE:
You are advertising various cruises – many of which share the same route across the Mediterranean. The cruises run for varying lengths; one route is 7 days, one is 10 days, and one is 14. Plus, these cruises include luxury, premium, and standard packages available for each timeframe – all at different price points.
If it’s important for you to be able to retarget and drive awareness of each variation, you would need a separate id for each. If, however, you’re more interested in driving traffic back to your website so users can “choose their own adventure,” then one id per route is perfect.
How should I assign single destinations for my multi-location trips?
City, Country, and Region are listed by Facebook as mandatory fields for Destination Feeds – and there are a couple of important factors to keep in mind as you assign values to them.
First, city-level travel intent enables Facebook to connect your travel package with a user’s interest in a specific destination. While serving an ad based on travel signals offers minimal value for retargeting audiences – where audiences are based on website activity – it is critical for attracting new users to your website.
Second, you will need to select one city, one country and one region for each of the required fields. And because indexing is not a current capability for Facebook targeting, there is not yet a solution available to promote the same trip (same destination id) in five different cities.
Consider this scenario for an ALASKAN CRUISE:
Depending on the data layer of your website, you probably have one of the following values available:
- Departing City – example: Leaves from Seattle
- Arrival City – example: Arrives in Seattle after docking multiple times in Alaska
- Featured City – example: Juneau
- All Cities – All cities are listed, but you can dynamically pull the first or last value
While the departing city is often the easiest for advertisers to pull, a featured city will offer truer alignment with travel intent. For example, in this Alaskan Cruise scenario, travel intent to Seattle isn’t the same as travel intent to Juneau.
One important callout: the featured city is not mandatory to see great results from Facebook Travel Ads. While choosing a featured city vs. a starting city for multi-location trips can elevate results, many of our clients look to a “featured city” structure as a potential growth opportunity versus a mandatory component for launch.
What kind of feed should I be using?
With rare exception, we recommend using a destination feed for cruise lines, vacation packages, and other multi-location offerings. Hotel feeds typically offer lower value to multi-destination advertisers because they require additional fields (like address, zip code, latitude, and longitude), which add unnecessary complexity and minimal additional value when present in the feed.
How should the Facebook Pixel be implemented?
It can feel daunting to get the Facebook Pixel implemented and functioning well, but there’s a brief overview from Facebook on how to set up Destination Ads right here.
While Facebook doesn’t yet have an out-of-the-box solution for multi-destination advertisers, it is arguably one of the most powerful platforms for attracting and engaging new users in an ever more competitive travel market.
