Why Conversion Settings Can Make or Break Hotel Advertising on Facebook
TLDR: Meta, the umbrella company of Facebook and Instagram, gives marketers a huge toolkit for hotel advertising. Conversion Goals are an essential tool, identifying what you want the user to ultimately do after clicking on your ad. Not only does it matter for reporting on bookings and revenue — Conversion Goals tell the platform which ads work best and allow its machine learning to optimize toward better outcomes. Running ads on Meta? Make sure your conversion goals are set towards what you want to achieve.
What are Facebook Conversion Goals?
Facebook Conversion Goals are more than a label for keeping track of your hotel advertising campaigns. In short, they are a fundamental set of instructions. They tell the Meta Ads platform what you want the ad to achieve, helping it find your most likely customers based on behavior, user profile, and other cues.
For Conversion Goals to work properly, a hotel’s booking engine must be integrated with Meta Ads Manager. This helps the platform understand when it is successful in hitting the goals you’ve established. That’s usually bookings, driving revenue to your business. It could also take more indirect forms, such as Traffic, sending visitors to your site for a big announcement, or Awareness, maximizing the number of people who see your ad.
How Hotel Marketing Conversion Goals Work in Facebook & Instagram
Broken down into six main categories within Ads Manager, Conversion Goals steer complex machine learning systems fed by user profiles. Unsurprisingly, Meta knows a great deal about its active users! For a hotel advertising campaign run on Facebook or Instagram, the algorithms might look at past travel posts, purchases, other websites the user recently visited, types of content they interact with… the list goes on and on.
With integrations in place, Conversion Goals track a user interaction from clicking on an ad, all the way through converting (i.e. booking, purchasing, reserving) on your website.
When you set a Goal, Meta will serve ads to people it deems most likely to perform that action. And when some people actually take that Conversion Goal action, the platform rapidly narrows in on more people that fit that profile. That’s why recently launched ads run in “Learning Limited” mode. They’re shown to fewer people and they take some time to gain traction until Meta Ads finds its groove.
Sound complex? It is. All of this requires careful execution to ensure that your ads aren’t targeting the wrong people, or set up for the wrong goal. Because if they are, Facebook will spend your money on the wrong people or the wrong outcome. If you’re running hotel advertising campaigns on Meta, double check your conversion goals.
How to Optimize Meta Conversion Goals
Facebook and Instagram campaigns can be set up to just about any marketing goal. There are six available Conversion Goals. We’ll skip over App Promotion for this article.
Awareness: Show your ad to as many people as possible, regardless of clicks or other engagement. Hosting a big outdoor festival on Labor Day weekend? A limited Awareness run might be worth your while. Carefully identify and segment your audience to reach a specific region or set of interests.
Traffic: Maximizes visitors to your website or landing page, whether or not they end up booking. Trying to drive word-of-mouth for a grand opening or a new amenity on offer? Encourage people to dig into the deeper story.
Engagement: Pushes your ad to people most likely to like, comment, share, watch a video, or start a Messenger conversation. Think of it as more of a PR opportunity than a growth marketing driver.
Leads: Capture inquires for bigger business opportunities. Are you positioning yourself for corporate retreats or weddings? For any initiatives with a long sales cycle, this goal might work, but it tends to be expensive. We often recommend using lead forms on your website instead, and deploying other strategies to capture people seeking these experiences.
Sales: Focus on the people most likely to book a visit. Most hotel operators want marketing campaigns that drive measurable revenue, and so unsurprisingly, this is the Conversion Goal we use most often with our clients.
Conversion Goals can work in tandem. For example, a Traffic-focused hotel ad campaign can introduce a destination to a new market, enticing visitors from a relatively untapped city. People who click to a hotel’s website can then be retargeted with a Sales-focused goal to drive the booking. It all comes down to budget, timing, and your individual marketing challenge.
Are You Optimizing Your Hotel Marketing Campaigns Toward a Goal?
Many marketers launch ads with a “set it and forget it” mentality. With powerful algorithms behind my Facebook and Instagram campaigns, surely it’ll generate the results you want, right? Maybe. Most hotel operators get it: Meta campaigns need to be built carefully and monitored often. There’s always room for optimization. Consider:
- Are you targeting a tightly controlled audience profile?
- Does your ad creative position your hotel toward that audience’s preferences?
- Does your Conversion Goal match what you’re asking the user to do?
- Have you thoroughly tested your website and booking experience to eliminate extra steps and confusing experiences?
Critically examine these factors — just a few that hotel marketers can control. Set aside budgets and try new approaches!
- Target people in a certain city or region with a message that explicitly addresses them.
- Try a getaway offer for people with a certain profile, like parents or nurses.
- Retarget previous visitors with a seasonal message to fill offseason vacancies.
A combination of Conversion Goals and other Meta Ads settings make strategies like these possible. Looking for ways to expand your marketing capabilities? Not sure your hotel is using Facebook and Instagram advertising to its fullest? Reach out to us! We’d love to discuss ways that O’Rourke could grow revenue for your hotel.