Hotels What Next? Retargeting: Stay Top of Mind!

When the boom of new reservations will begin, we should not underestimate where they will come from.

NB: This is an article from Direct Your Bookings

Clearly we would want these bookings to flow in directly through our website and booking engine, but if we want to avoid spending tons of money in commissions (again) we must understand the logic of our customers.

A.k.a. our very old friend customer journey, that everyone talks about and no one respects.

Retargeting for Hotels: stay top of mind!

I’ve shown the below many times before, but let’s start from here, very quickly:

Optimistically, only 3% of your prospects are ready to book when they first visit your website.

This alone should explain how the battle on having the best price on Metasearch engines, is NOT always one worth battling, because it means competing with the OTAs on their most proficient field.

But, ok, let’s put this MSE topic aside for now, as it would require a dedicated posts, video and discussions to further elaborate.

Back on focus: people visiting your site for the first time, at a certain point leave the site without making any booking.. and most times they never come back.

Does this mean that all these people leaving are not interested in your hotel? Or does it mean that they prefer not booking directly with you, thus choosing an OTA site?

Not at all!

It simply means that they simply didn’t have the time because of billions of other reasons. Here some:

• visitor is looking at your site via mobile. He’s interested in your hotel, but prefer to wait to be back home, where he can complete the reservation using his laptop: lost momentum.
• visitor is on the tram and… oops, he needs to get off now: lost momentum.
• visitor is literally a click away from completing the booking when… his daughter jumped on him claiming to play hide&seek: lost momentum.
• visitor already is ready to send you his credit card details but.. phone call, his boss who wants the report on his desk in minus 5 minutes: lost momentum.

We could go on forever, but you get the point.

Another even simpler reason is that those visitors haven’t reached the top of the pyramid, meaning they are not yet in their booking mode.

This is what remarketing (or retargeting) is for: to stay top of mind for when, at some point, they will be ready to book.

Now, remarketing can be done using Google or Facebook.

For many different reasons that I am not going to explore now, I prefer working with Facebook.

No matter what the tool, the concept and flow remains the same. Here’s how Retargeting works:

Now, for the purpose of this post, I won’t get into further details and nuances of retargeting and how to technically set that up (to this point, stay tuned as I have a gift for you).

I guess, in fact, that is not even what you are interested in. Nor technicalities are something you have to necessarily learn, that’s what you pay your web agency for, right?

What I want you to understand, even if you have already been running retargeting campaigns, is that there are soooooo many things, initiatives and strategies that you can adopt, that might wonder “how the hell have we not been doing all this already”.

And, in my opinion, you must be aware of all these possibilities, so that you no longer passively wait for your agency to bring you the results that you have been hoping for, but you have the knowledge to roughly assess the operational aspects of your investment.

Covering all these possibilities would be impossible, but let me say something: with Facebook Advertisment, there is barely something that you can’t do.

Let’s see together a few examples and how hotels can benefit from them, specifically talking about retargeting.

Retargeting Ad: an example.

First, this is how a retargeting ad for hotels looks like on Facebook:

Everything marked with the “Sponsored” label is an ad.

Other than that, they look just like any other post of your friends.

Let’s see now how to get different people to see this kind of ads.

Not all website visitors are the same.

When I run into hotels that already have retargeting campaigns in place, usually they re-market to all users who visited their site but haven’t make a booking yet.

All good, indeed. that’s exactly what we want.

However, like all other marketing campaigns, retargeting is as much effective as more precise and specific we get.

In fact, all those users are shown with the exact same ad, with the same content and call-to-action, no matter what they actually did and how they behaved when visited your site.

For instance:

• User A spent 3 minutes on the site.
• User B visited the restaurant section.
• User C made a booking search, meaning jumped onto the booking engine.
• User D watched at least 50% of the beautiful video on your home page.

I mean, literally, everything can be tracked. And everything can be used to better target your visitors.

Think about it, can a user who spend 7 minutes reading and watching everything you say about your rooms and spa, then jumped onto the booking engine to make a booking search, and a user who bounce immediately from your home page after only 7 seconds?

Of course not.

Thus, logically, showing them the exact same ad, simply because they both visited your website and didn’t book, is not as effective as it could be.

Let’s see some practical examples, trying now to define the booking phase and the type of traffic based on users’ interaction:

The last column is the ultimate goal of the ad that we should respectively be adopting.

In other words, what do we want our retargeted users when seeing and clicking our ad?

For instance:

✅ Audience: Users who visited the website, but didn’t make any booking search.

They are likely look around, meaning your hotel is one of many options they are scanning.

They are either dreaming or planning their trip.

What does this mean? That all those sense-of-urgency and scarcity message have no appeal to people in these phases.

This is also why we shouldn’t be aiming to convert (objective= Purchase) them into customer at first glance: they are not there yet.

Instead, we might want to facilitate a discussion with these prospects. In other words, to open a conversation so that they can either chat with either a BOT (will talk about BOT another time) or a physical person.

Why? Because people in their planning phase are insecure, scared. They fear to make the wrong decision.

Thus, they bombard themselves with too many inputs, trying to gather as much information as possible, with the goal – and the anxiety – of soon to be getting to a point: decide where to go (thus, where to book).

“Will I regret choosing this hotel? Or should I book this other one? Oh, s***, there’s also this boutique hotel that looks so nice, but it’s a bit over budget. What should I do?”

Unspoken words: this are the internal discussions planning people are having with themselves.

Why not easing them into a 1-on-1 conversation with your BOT or a human (your Staff) so that he can have all his doubts cleared up?

You see now, what respecting the customer journey means?

Btw, when you have your prospects finally open up a chat with you… you have no excuses: that prospects should NEVER go back to any OTA site to complete the reservation.

So, practically, what could it be an ad type for such users?

Key Takeaways:

• Show a photo that is also found on the website, more likely on the home page: it has to be a picture your users are familiar with, they will easier associate the ad to your hotel, even before reading the text.
• Start with a question: it automatically ease users into a conversation, which is the goal of the ad.
• Try different angles, meaning copy, images, formats. It doesn’t mean that this example is the one that undoubtedly outperforms all other version. The principle is: what works for other hotels, may not be working for you. So test, test and, again, TEST!
• The Insider Travel Secret Guide perfectly relates with planning phase these users are in: prepare some travel itineraries using Google Maps, it’s free and takes minutes, but do it well.

Another example.

✅ Users who visited the website AND made a booking search.

I know I know, people in planning mode could also have made a booking search.

Point being, check your Google Analytics figures and see what the CTR (click-through-rate) is, meaning how many people actually performed a booking search, out of the total number of website visitors.

You will notice that most of your users do NOT click your Check Availability/Book Now button.

When I gain access to a Google Analytics account of hotels, this is the second thing I go look for (conversion rate first): on average, more than 70+% do not make any booking search, a.k.a. a huge pool of prospects we let go, likely forever.

Thus, those who did make a booking search, are likely to be considered WARM traffic, probably even HOT, floating among planning and booking modes: prepare, they are ready to (virtually) swipe their cards!

Translated, now we can be more aggressive with our retargeting ad, as the available time to stay top of mind is getting quite slim.

Many option in our arsenal, but I would like to propose something relatively new, and I am still relatively new at working with, but extremely powerful, yet unknown in the market: Facebook Dynamic Ads for Travel (DAT).

I spare you the details but, in a nutshell, this is what I call the Hospitality’s trump card: want a magic wand? here it is!

What follows is an ad I’d suggest using for remarketing to these people, using Facebook DAT:

A user made a search with arrival the 20th of May? DAT now dynamically inserts the check-in date each user submitted in their respective booking search. And the Book Now is set up to bring users to the booking engine with that pre-populated check-in date.

Now, the beauty of Dynamic Ads for Travel, is not just about having shopped check-in dates dynamically filling your ad, but the fact that we can use this and many other revenue-related KPSs to further define our audience.

For example, let’s assume that you want to push more sales and revenue by giving an advantage, let’s say an additional 10% discount, to those searching for 3 or more nights.

Make sense, right? The greater the number of nights, the more juicy a reservation is, especially if they turn into direct bookings.

At the same time, you don’t want to make this discount publicly visible, because you’d be forced to make it available on all OTAs who would otherwise complain and/or cut your ranking, with all that it entails in terms of additional commissions.

Thus, very simply:

✅ create an ad that targets to visitors who made a booking search for at least 3 nights;
✅ include the relative discount code or rate code in the destination link of the Book Now button.

Here’s how to create a Custom Audience in Facebook for the example above (people who Search-ed for at least 3 Nights):

Where you see custom_param2, that is the field I have been feeding Facebook with, by sending the number of nights included in each Search.

Hotels’ magic wand: ad super in target, happy likely-soon-to-become-direct-customers, and… ciao ciao OTAs.

Believe me, what I showed you above is 0.1% of endless possibilities we can take advantage with Facebook Advertisement.

What a better time then now to learn and get ready for the recovery?

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