How To Drive More Bookings With Facebook Website Custom Audiences

Posted on May 14th 2018 in Social Media

Facebook custom audiences allow you to target groups of people who have visited your hotel’s website and performed (or not performed) certain actions while browsing it. It’s a great tool for reaching out to people who are interested in your property, but are yet to take the specific actions you want them to take (such as making a booking or signing up to your mailing list) with highly relevant content designed to re-engage and convert.

If you’re not yet taking advantage of Facebook website custom audiences, today’s blog will show you 4 powerful ways to make this great feature work for your hotel.

Getting Started

Before you can start using website custom audiences, you need to install the Facebook tracking pixel on your hotel’s website. Next, open the Ads Manager main menu and go to your Audiences dashboard. Click Create Audience, then Custom Audience from the drop-down menu. Select Website Traffic.

You’ll now be able to choose and create the different custom audiences you want to target from the groups of people who have visited your website.

1: Target Everyone Who Visited Your Hotel’s Website

The default option for custom audiences, this option is perfect for smaller properties that don’t generate enough traffic to their website to segment their audience by page views.

You’ll need to specify the timeframe for your custom audience. Obviously creating a longer timeframe will mean a larger audience, while a shorter one will ensure the people in your audience are those who have shown interest in your property most recently and may still be itching to book. When you’ve decided on the duration, give your audience a name and click Create Audience.

2: Target Guests Who Started the Booking Process but Didn’t Complete

This custom audience allows you to directly target and re-engage those people with a strong interest in staying at your property – people who have started to make a booking but for whatever reason, are yet to complete the checkout process.

To begin, select Add to Cart from the drop-down list, then choose Include More and then Initiate Checkout. To finish and create your custom audience of almost-bookers, click Exclude and select Purchase action.

3: Target Past Guests

Drive repeat bookings from previous guests by creating a custom audience of people who have stayed at your property before. Using your custom audience, you can then target these people with special promotions and exclusive discounts to drive another booking.

To create this kind of audience, select Purchase from the drop-down menu which appears under your event actions, and then choose your duration and audience title.

4: Target People Who Read Your Blog

If you maintain a regular blog on your hotel website – which you absolutely should - this custom audience is for you. You can either target everyone who visits your blog, or single out those who visit specific pages on your blog, if you want to get ultra-targeted with your re-engagement efforts.

This is an audience segment that clearly has significant interest in your property and is likely to be responsive to your hotel’s specials, or even just further content promotions.

To strengthen your relationship with this audience, choose People Who Visited Specific Web Pages, and enter the word “blog” in the Contains field. You can now target all those guests and potential guests who have visited a page that contains a URL with the word “blog” in it.

Try experimenting with different time variations to get a feel for the size of the audience, starting with 30 days and extending the duration to 90s days.

Website custom audiences are a powerful way to target those people who are most interested in staying at your property. With some carefully crafted content, you can re-engage these prospects and drive them back to your site to book.

What do you think? Have you given website custom audiences a go? Let us know in the comments below!