The Best Facebook Ads For Hotels

Leveraging Facebook’s various ad formats can help a hotel tailor its marketing campaigns to attract more potential guests and drive direct bookings. Facebook offers four basic ad types with countless customization options to help brands create ads to drive engagement, reach new audiences, generate leads, improve brand awareness, and achieve other marketing objectives. 

Getting the most out of Facebook advertising for hotels requires a solid social media strategy that accounts for each ad format’s strengths. With the right ad design and placement, you can successfully target guests at various points along the conversion funnel. 

Your strategy should begin with identifying your primary targeting objectives and what success for each means. Then you can select the ad type best suited for those purposes. 

Are you new to Facebook ads or need a crash course? Read on below to get up to speed. If you’re ready to dive in, we’ve outlined common objectives for hotel Facebook ad formats – and examples – that you may be considering and how these formats can help your campaigns succeed:

Getting Started With Facebook Ads

More than two billion people use Facebook each month, which makes advertising lucrative—when it’s done correctly. Facebook offers four main ad types—Image, Video, Carousel, and Collection. Each of these formats supports high-quality visuals, and you can design the ads in the platform or bring in content from your marketing library. You don’t need to be an expert to advertise successfully on Facebook, but you do need to have a basic understanding of the platform and the ad formats.

How Do I Advertise a Hotel on Facebook?

Facebook offers ads designed specifically for hotels, so getting started with a basic campaign is easy—all you need to advertise your property is a Facebook page, an ad account, a catalog of hotel inventory, and for retargeting purposes, to set up Meta Pixel tracking on your website.

Which Hotel Facebook Ad Formats Are Most Effective?

Videos are the most engaging content type on Facebook, and dynamic video ads for hotels are highly effective for attracting attention, storytelling, and building brand awareness. But if you’re highlighting your hotel’s best amenity, an ad featuring a single, stunning image can easily entice the right audience.

How To Make Hotel Facebook Ads Perform Better

Poor ad performance often results from poor targeting, which you can address by analyzing conversion tracking and ad diagnostics data to see which demographics are clicking on your ads, and then building custom audiences based on that information. Facebook also allows your hotel to target ads to a lookalike audience and serve those to users with similar characteristics to your existing customers.

1. Facebook Page Like Ads

The primary goal of ‘page likes’ ads is just that — to acquire more page likes. But that doesn’t mean you’re necessarily buying engagement. Facebook’s page likes advertising for hotels must target a qualified audience—those interested in similar brands, travel, or the destination—to serve ads to people most inclined to like and follow your page.

Engagement is one of Facebook’s newsfeed algorithm factors. If you publish a post and your fan base is actively engaging with and sharing your content, Facebook favors that content, which will organically reach a larger audience base. But if you publish flat content that never gains any momentum, Facebook will gradually reduce how often it appears. Buying ads to target an unqualified audience can kill your engagement rate, and as a result, your organic reach.

That’s why TravelBoom typically recommends saving your budget and building a better organic experience to acquire new followers. This method is usually more cost-effective than spending hundreds on a campaign to increase your page likes. The exception is for newer hotels that may not have a following. In that case, setting aside a budget to build a following through targeted ads may be more beneficial.

Concentrating on serving your hotel’s core audiences hyper-focused Facebook ads can help assure that the people you reach are interested in your brand and will actively engage with your content.

Facebook offers many targeting options hotels can use for their ads. These can be layered to reach a specific niche, making it easy to serve ads to the demographic most interested in what you have to say. These advanced targeting methods also make it easy to match specific ad copy to a specific audience.

This Facebook ‘page likes’ ad for Grand Wailea Maui highlights their generous outdoor amenities, an important feature for this beachside resort.

Tips on Facebook Page Like Advertising for Hotels:

• Use high-quality images to highlight unique property amenities, rooms, and features.
• Always crop and center images appropriately if they exceed the recommended dimensions.

2. Facebook Page Promoted Posts

Page post engagement ads are a great way to increase the reach of your hotel’s content. Promoted posts offer advanced targeting to advertise to specific audiences. You can customize the reach to only people who have liked your page already, a mix of current and potential page fans, or people who are not fans (yet).

This Facebook ad format is compatible with any hotel post type — status updates, photos, videos, and offers.

Promoted posts can run with virtually any budget and for any length of time. Facebook also provides an audience size estimate and estimated daily results (reach and post engagement) based on your budget, targeting selections, and estimated run time. Be sure to select the correct option for your budget when creating an ad: Accidentally entering your entire campaign budget as a daily spend is easier than you think.

Promoted Posts vs. Boosted Posts

Both promoted and boosted posts increase the content’s visibility, but promoted posts use advanced targeting to advertise to a specific audience, and fine-tuning a boosted post is fairly limited. The “boost post” option is also available at the bottom of every post published on your hotel’s Facebook business page, unless something in the post disqualifies it from boosting. Boosted posts are helpful when hotels want to increase the reach of important property news, like announcing renovated rooms or new amenities, or to help spread the word about a giveaway or promotion. Though boosted posts differ from typical Facebook ads and lack several targeting features, these are an efficient option and can be built directly from your Facebook page, without having to create a campaign in Facebook Ads Manager.

The Plaza Hotel uses a promoted post to highlight summer stays with a shortened link and uses social recognition via an influencer marketing campaign.

Tips for Hotel Advertising Through Facebook’s Promoted Posts:

• Use promotions or giveaways to entice email signups and post engagement.

Use marketing psychology tactics for hotels, like creating a sense of urgency, to help drive bookings.

3. Facebook Reach & Awareness Ads

If your hotel’s marketing objectives for its Facebook advertising campaigns are to improve brand recognition, the platform’s Awareness Ads can help you reach more customers and stay top of mind. These ads can reach as many people as possible within your budget.

With a Facebook reach or awareness ad, the campaign can be optimized to:

• Show your ad to as many users in your target audience as possible.
• Deliver your hotel’s video ads to people most likely to engage with them.
• Use Ad Recall Lift metrics to deliver your ad to people Facebook estimates would remember seeing it up to two days later.

Because the results for these ad types are considered “action-less” — meaning Facebook isn’t serving your ad for people to take a specific action — we recommend incorporating a few other metrics to measure campaign performance. Demand generation metrics for hotels can help you measure the success of awareness-focused campaigns.

The composition of a Facebook awareness or reach ad includes a media asset (image, video, or carousel), a headline, a description, primary text, an optional call to action, and an optional website link.

Great Wolf Lodge uses a quick, six-second video and simple ad copy to attract Facebook users.

Facebook Reach & Awareness Ads Tips for Hotels:

• Make a good first impression with a video introducing your hotel and telling a compelling story.
• Use a reach campaign to get people to take action. The great thing about a Facebook reach campaign is that you have a higher chance of connecting with more people in your target audience than other ad types do, including an audience more inclined to purchase soon.
• Use demand generation metrics to measure the full scope of your reach and awareness campaigns.
• Set a frequency cap for your reach campaigns so your ads aren’t served to the same people too often, which can result in ad fatigue.

4. Facebook Lead Generation Ads

Lead generation ads are a great way for hotels to acquire high-quality leads, both for email marketing or for reservation requests. Because this is a true “top of funnel” ad type, combining this format with strategic targeting is a great way to reach potential guests before they have made travel plans.

When creating the ad, you’ll also be able to create a form in Facebook Ads Manager for visitors to submit. The form is easy to build and includes a bounty of options for information collection. The form includes a greeting section where you should clearly state the benefits of signing up, the list the guest is signing up for, a background image, and pre-filled questions like email, full name, and city. You can also create custom questions more relevant to your offering.

A Facebook lead form includes a section for questions, form completion, and an intro like the example above.

MyrtleBeach.com uses an enticing promotional giveaway to encourage email sign-ups.

Try to create a balance of collecting valuable information without overwhelming the guest with fields. Pre-filled question information on the form will auto-populate with the information listed on Facebook, though the visitor will be able to edit the information provided. All information collected will be stored on Facebook and will be available as a download for you to easily upload to your email or marketing platforms. For hotels, grab only the information that is relevant to your goal. This is typically first name, last name, and email.

More questions about Facebook Lead ads? Check out the Facebook help center for more information on this ad type.

Tips for Hotels Running Facebook Lead Generation Ads:

• Test different form fields to find the sweet spot in information and length. The more relevant info you can collect, the better, but be wary of asking for too much too soon.
• Segment an audience of people who opened the form but didn’t submit their information and retarget them to return and complete the form.

5. Facebook Website Click Ads

For the hotel owner who wishes to use Facebook advertising to drive more direct traffic to the property’s site, website click ads are the way to go. These ads get new eyes on any page of your hotel website or booking engine.

Depending on how aggressive you want to make your campaign, combine these Facebook ads with guidance from Meta Pixel, which will monitor success and optimize the campaigns accordingly.

Improve your success by testing different ad copy varieties with different call-to-action buttons to help you identify which combinations drive the most engagement and revenue.

Disney’s Aulani Resort & Spa uses simple messaging and a call to action to entice users to click through to their website.

The Bellagio Las Vegas chooses to highlight their on-site dining experiences with a carousel ad and See Menu calls to action buttons.

Tips for Hotels Using Facebook Website Click Ads:

• Giveaways and contests engage fans and help hotels collect email addresses for future communications.
• Always highlight any deals, promotions, or offers front and center on your website, social channels, and ad copy.
• These ads are perfect for segmenting guests and driving audiences to different parts of your website. Use this feature to test visuals and destination pages to maximize ROI.

6. Facebook Conversion Ads

Deer Valley Resort entices users to Book Now with a special offer for summer that is clearly communicated in the ad copy.

Get as many conversions within your budget as possible with conversion ads.

With Meta Pixel implementation, you can track important user events on your website, like a contact form submission, room search, or booking purchase. Track and optimize your ad delivery on Facebook based on these customer behaviors, and more. There are just two easy steps to setting up a Meta Pixel on your site – don’t miss out on the benefits. 

Based on the conversion event you’ve selected to optimize for, Facebook will tailor ad delivery to those in your targeted audience most likely to convert for that specific event. With website traffic and conversion campaigns, we always recommend additional link tracking to measure the full scope of your ads.

Note: Even if your events exist on a separate domain (think booking engine), you can still run conversion ads. 

Tips for Successful Hotel Facebook Conversion Ads:

• At the very least, we recommend implementing Search, Initiate Checkout, and Purchase events on your booking engine to utilize Facebook’s conversion ads to the fullest.
• Based on the audience you plan to target, use ad copy to your advantage. For instance, the ad copy for a campaign that targets users lower in the conversion funnel should be different from the ad copy in a campaign that targets a colder audience.

Facebook Ad Specifications

Customizations may be limited by the ad type you select. For example, you cannot customize the headline or description for a Facebook ‘page likes’ ad.

For website click and conversion ads, you can submit multiple headlines, descriptions, and primary text. This allows Facebook to deliver the ad copy variations most likely to drive engagement from your targeted audience. Follow Facebook’s ad guidelines for technical requirements and you’ll find handy design and text recommendations and character limits there, too.

Facebook advertising for hotels is a profitable marketing channel that can help improve brand awareness, reach, and lead generation. If you want help integrating Facebook advertising campaigns into your hotel’s big-picture marketing, contact TravelBoom today.

Jeremy Razook – Digital Marketing Specialist at TravelBoom. Connect with Jeremy on LinkedIn.

About TravelBoom Marketing

TravelBoom specializes in developing and executing customized data-driven marketing solutions that drive direct bookings and growth for its clients. With over 25 years of experience in digital marketing for travel and hotels, TravelBoom leverages advanced data science and analytics to uncover insights and develop strategies that greatly enhance results for our clients and reduce reliance on third-party channels. TravelBoom is also host of the world’s #1 ranked Hotel Marketing Podcast and its quarterly Traveler Sentiment Study both of which can be found at www.travelboommarketing.com.