Now, there are different platforms that allow you to run Ads viz. Google, OTAs, and so on. 

In this blog, we will discuss one of the most famous and common platforms to run ads: Facebook.

You’d definitely agree with me that Facebook is indeed a great platform for promoting your hotel. And when you set up Facebook Ads for your hotel, it can turn into a driving source for bookings as well. 

Facebook provides a great opportunity for you to attract followers to book via Ads. It assists you to find your ideal audience online for hotel marketing.

Before directly jumping to how to set up Facebook Ads for hotels, let’s begin by understanding,

What are Facebook Ads?

Facebook Ads appear in the news feed on the desktop, mobile news feed, and on the right column of Facebook on the desktop. Most Facebook Ads are run with two main strategies: target users (almost) anywhere to purchase or take actions online, or target specific users who are nearby to stop in at your hotel and eventually book a room. 

There are hotels that target users everywhere to bring them to their hotel or at least the hotel website.

With over 1.6 billion people using Facebook, there are more chances of hitting the right audience, given that you set up the right ad. 

Because these ads look as a part of your feed, they are more accepted by the audience.

Why should hotels run Facebook Ads?

Facts first,

Over 6 million businesses are using Facebook ads to reach their target audiences.

Lyfe Marketing

Whereas, hotels who are not active on Facebook and Facebook Ads can lose approximately 18-25% of potential revenue. 

Therefore, running Facebook Ads (or at least giving them a try) should be inevitably a part of your hotel marketing strategy.

What are the benefits of running Facebook Ads?

Now, obviously, the businesses running ads on Facebook are seeing some profit. They’re reaching wider audiences and getting more sign ups.

Similarly, there are a few benefits to gain once you set up Facebook Ads for hotels.

• Higher ROI: Facebook ads are an effective source of revenue generation. If implemented and practiced well, they can give you a good ROI. 
• More Bookings: Ads promote your hotel like a wild fire. When your Facebook page followers come across your ads, there are high chances that they book with you, giving you more bookings than usual. 
• Branding: With the ads, your hotel’s branding is sorted to a great extent. 
• Must-have for new hotels: If you have just started a hotel business and aren’t sure of its promotion, then getting your hands on Ads is definitely an assured way to establish your brand.   

Therefore, you should immediately explore and start with your Facebook Ads and make the most of it.

Now, before we learn about how to set up Facebook Ads for hotels, let me brief you about the,

Prerequisites required to run Facebook Ads

Facebook Ads are all about images and videos. For that you need to have:

1. Facebook business profile
2. Facebook page of your property
3. High-resolution photos and videos of your property, nearby scenic destinations and so on
4. A budget (Of course!)

Now that you are all set to get started. Let’s begin…

How to set up Facebook Ads for hotels?

You may find configuring Facebook Ads tricky/complicated in the first place, but it’s NOT actually. We will be clarifying each and every step in detail along with images to help you understand it better.  

To run and manage ads, Facebook provides a powerful platform that is Facebook Business Manager. 

Step 1: Create a Facebook Ad account

You need to log in with your business email in Facebook Business Manager from here. You will see the following screen:

Click on Create Business Button. You will see the following screen, in which you have to fill in all the details. By entering those details, your Ad account will be created. 

Once your Ad account is created, it will lead you to the following screen. This is the place where you can manage your Facebook ads thoroughly.

Important note: To have your ad account, you SHOULD have a Facebook page of your property. 

Step 2: Setting up a Facebook Ad Campaign

Click on the three lines visible on the top-left corner of the screen. A pop-up menu will appear with a wide range of options. From a wide range of options. Select Ad Manager, under Create & Manage menu.

From here, you can manage the A-Z of your Facebook Ads. Now we will see how to,

When you click on “Ad Manager”, the following screen will appear. Click on the “Create Ad”. 

Step 3: Define your marketing objective

This is one of the important steps that you have to take care of while setting up Facebook Ads. As soon as you click on Create Ad, the following screen will appear.

Facebook asks you to mention the objective of setting up the Ad. Our objective, as a hotelier is “conversions”; which means you want people to book your hotel rooms when they click on your ad.

As you can see, there are different types of marketing objectives. If you want to create brand awareness, or only reach, or want to get video views, you can accordingly select the suitable option. 

Once you click on that “Conversions”, you will get landed on the following screen.  

Here you have to add the campaign name.

Just after the campaign name, you will see two other options:

1. Create a split test: If you want to split your audience and test the impact of ads on different types of the audience then you do that. Other than that, there are many other options to create a split test as well. (Creating an A/B test lets you run experiments and collect data that shows you the best performing creative, placement, audience, and delivery optimization strategies.)
2. Campaign Budget Optimization: Next is Campaign Budget Optimization. You can enable this option if you want to optimize your ad budget.

With Facebook, when you limit your budget, your expenses won’t cross your limits. Thus you will get conversions as per your budget. Click on “Set up Ad account”.

Step 4: Create Ad account 

Enter all your details that are required, viz. country, the currency and the time zone that you are in. All your ad billing and reporting data will be recorded in the mentioned currency and time zone.

Step 5: Ad set name

In this step, you will see the following screen.

The step is to define where you want to bring the conversion. Do you want visitors to land on your website, download your app or text you on messenger? In our case, we will select the website. 

Then you will find the option of Facebook Pixel. Facebook Pixel is nothing but a piece of code that you have to embed in your website code to track the performance of your Facebook Ads. We have covered this in next part of the blog. 

Step 6: Set up the target audience

In this phase of the campaign setup, there are two options:

1. Create a new Facebook target audience
2. Use the saved audience

Custom or look alike audiences are another extremely powerful targeting option for you. With custom audiences, you can create audiences based on your website traffic with something called the Facebook Pixel. (We will understand about Pixel later in the coming steps.)

While creating an audience, you can select the location, age, gender, and even language. The option of the detailed target in very interesting as it lets you add the demographics, interests, and behaviors as well. 

You can specifically target CEOs, general managers, people of the specific organizations with this feature. People who mention their designation on their Facebook profiles are internally grouped by Facebook and if you mention here, your ads will be sent to them specifically to be precise in targeting the audience.

You can select the country; one or multiple where this ad is to be displayed, age of your target audience and the gender. For instance, if you run a hostel, you can select age 18 and above. For targeting families, you can write 28 and above and so on. This will narrow down your audience for better.

As you build your audience, Facebook will display your estimated daily reach and tell you if your audience is too big, too small or if it’s just right using the meter. You can target “likes” or interests on Facebook, behaviors or demographics, and create very specific audiences to target in your campaign.

Let me tell you, to set up Facebook Ads for hotels, creating right audience is as important as selecting the budget. Setting up the right Facebook target audience is of unparalleled importance for the final results of your advertising.

Step 7: Set up your ad placement

By default, Facebook will have “automatic placements” that include Facebook, Instagram and Audience Network. But generally, it will use the placements optimized to give you the best results. You can also edit your placements if you have some data on which placement works best for you.

Step 8: Budget and schedule

Here you can set up your budget of Facebook ads.

Facebook gives you two budgeting options:

• Daily budget –  Facebook will spend this sum on delivering your ads every day during your campaign. When you set your daily budget, you’re telling Facebook to get you roughly your daily budget’s worth of the results every day.
• Lifetime budget – Facebook will divide the total campaign budget more or less evenly across the campaign dates. If you set a lifetime budget, Facebook will ask you for the campaign dates, so that it can calculate the average spend for each day.

We recommend that you set a daily budget and an unlimited campaign duration so that you can later edit your daily budgets and pause the campaign whenever you see fit.

Important Note:  You can’t change an ad set’s budget type after the ad set has been created. Make sure you make the right selection during the campaign setup.

Step 9: Set up your identity

In this step, you have to first select the Facebook page that will represent your business in ads. 

If you have a connected Instagram account as well, then you can add here. Basically, your ads will be shown to both the platforms. 

Create Ad:

First, you have to select the format of the ads. Facebook offers different formats to display your ads. They are: 

1. Carousel
2. Single Image or video
3. Collection of image

You can either select some existing posts as well (You can use this option when you are hosting an event at your hotel or partnering with any organization. In that case, you can run ads on the event post).

Secondly, select the images or videos as you want from the prerequisites. You can create a slideshow as well. 

The standard ad format of Facebook is as shown below: 

There are 4 important elements: Primary text, headline, description, and image. 

With the new Facebook Ads Update, now you can add 5 options of primary texts. Facebook will select any of these 5 options and will display different combinations. (As shown in the following image)

Following are the parameters or guidelines for the checklist :

1. Recommended image size: 1200 x 628 (1080 x 1080 for a 1:1 image). No maximum size restrictions.
2. Image ratio: 9:16 to 16:9 (no link involved), 1.9:1 to 1:1 (if there is a link)
3. Images no more than 20% text
4. Image file types: .jpg or .png (Note: animated GIFS should be uploaded as a video ad)
5. Text: 125 characters (if there is no link)
6. Headline: 25 characters (any more will appear truncated)
7. Link Description: No limit. 

One of the important parameters to look for is the RESPONSIVENESS of your ads. Your ads should look perfectly fine on any device. On the same lines, you need to put up such descriptions, and headlines that will be completely visible on various devices.  

When you configure all these details, you will see a preview of how your ads will look like.

How to write these ads?  

Even writing Facebook ads is quite easy. Unlike Google Ads, you don’t have any limitation of words or headlines. You can write whatever you want, however, you want. Moreover, it gives you full control of the form of the ads viz. Image or content, image+ content and so on. 

Don’t worry, we have got some ready to use Ad copies. You can get started by using them, make a few changes and create your own ads. 

Step 10: Confirm your ad campaign

Click Confirm. This is the last step to set up. You are now all set to launch your own Facebook Ad campaign. 

This is how you can make easily set up Facebook Ads for hotels.

Now, obviously, you won’t just calmly wait for the conversion of the Facebook ads. You want o to bring the most of these Ads and for that, you need to track your Facebook ads. Let’s see, 

How to track conversions from Facebook Ads?

Follow these simple steps to track their performance and conversion from Ads. 

Step 1: Set up Facebook Pixel

As mentioned before, you can track your ads with Facebook Pixel. Firstly, you have to select the “Pixel” from the “Events Manager” portal on your Facebook Ad Manager Page. 

It will lead you to the following screen.

When you click on “Create a Pixel”, it will lead you to the following screen and ask you to name the pixel and check your website.

Step 2: Connect Pixel to website activity

Once that is done, click on Continue, it will lead you to the following screen:

As you can see, Facebook gives you different options to choose the install the pixel code:

1. Add code using a partner integration: If you website is hosted on any third party content management system (CMS) like Shopify, WordPress or so, you can select this option
2. Manually add Pixel code to website: If your website is not hosted on CMS, then you can manually ass the code using this option
3. Email instruction to a developer: If you don’t have access to your website’s direct code, Facebook lets you you can simply email the Pixel code along with the instructions. So your website developer can assist you in doing so. 

We will select the second option, as you select it, following screen will appear.

Step 3: Installing pixel on the website

Simply copy the base code and install it on your website in the last step.

You can see actions that people take after seeing your ads and track the performance of your Facebook Ads to all corners.

By following all these steps, you can effectively set up Facebook Ads for your hotel and measure its performance.

FAQs: We’ve answered some of your basic questions

In conclusion

Facebook Ads is one of the outstanding platforms that give you a golden opportunity to get more bookings as well as expand your reach. Ergo, you should instantly start with it. By now, you must be totally aware of every nook and cranny of how to set up Facebook Ads for hotels.

Moreover, if you compare the cost and the return, then it would be surely more feasible than the other strategies. The ultimate benefit is that you can manage you can run, manage and stop these ads on your own. You don’t need any additional assistance.  

If you have any questions or would like to know more about this, do let me know in the comment section below. 

The post How to Set Up Facebook Ads for Your Hotel: A Step-by-step Guide appeared first on eZee Absolute.

If you own a hotel website already and even have good SEO in place, what would (or should be) be your next step to get more bookings?

Definitely, you will want to reach more guests first to do that. Advertisements on Google are the best way to do so.

And this blog tells you exactly how to set up Google ads for your property, and get started with your hotel PPC campaigns.

Before we delve into all the do’s and don’ts, let’s understand Google ads from the scratch.

What are Google Ads (AdWords)?

Facts first.

Google receives approximately 63000 searches per second.

SEO Tribunal

Per second.

That’s not a number I can kid about.

And this is just the facts from search results. I cannot even begin to talk about Google’s display network.

Google Ads will show your hotel’s ad to the searchers when they are searching for hotels in your location, or in similar scenarios. Is there a better time to show it?

Take a look at this example:

This is a Google Search Ad. It is visible at the top of the search results when you search for something in Google.

And now check out this example:

This is a Google Display Ad. These ads are visible to those who have visited your website (or any page) and leave it without taking any action (or making a booking). These are also called REMARKETING Ads.

Suffice to say, running Google Ads can help you hit that unicorn status in digital marketing and hotel advertising campaigns.

With Google Ads, you can create stronger and more focused paid campaigns for your hotel to increase footfall and bookings.

Why should hotels run Google ads?

Hotel advertising is an effective way to reach your target audience at an optimum time, improve booking rates, and consequently fetch more revenue for your hotel.

Though, here are a few sure shot benefits of running Google ads for your hotel.

• To generate revenue: Ads on Google are an effective source of revenue generation. They target your audience at the right time, quickening his decision to stay at your property. Put together correctly, these ads can give you a good ROI.
• To generate more bookings (obviously): Ads make your hotel popular. They are visible to even those far-fetched audiences who are out of your reach. When people see ads, they tend to book your hotel and hence you generate more bookings than usual.
• To improve your branding: A well thought advertisement on Google running for a longer period of time registers well in people’s minds and alleviates your brand value.
• To get more website visitors: People visit your website upon seeing Ads. This definitely increases your website visitors. More than that, there is a possibility that they make bookings and convert to guests from visitors. 
• Boon for new hotels: If you have just stepped into the hospitality industry and have a new hotel; marketing it can be tough. Letting people know about your new hotel can be done through Google Ads easily. 

Do keep in mind that the Google Ads which I’m talking about is completely different than the Google Hotel Ads platform which Google provides to increase your direct bookings.

The below images will clarify the difference between both:

With Google having audiences reaching millions (and even trillions), there’s no doubt that with the right strategies, you’ll be able to benefit remarkably out of the ads. Start considering to set up Google ads for your hotel, at least for some time period.

Beginner’s checklist to get started with Google ads

If you are a beginner to paid advertisements, here are a few things you need keep in mind (and NEED to have them ready) before you set them up.

To start with, register on Google for your hotel’s email address. This email address will be identified as your primary medium to contact. Other pre-requisites are:

• Budget: These ads belong to the paid advertisement category, and you should have a budget to set up an ad. Decide how much you want to spend on the ads. The cost varies depending on target audience, location preference and many other factors (we’ll go through them when I show you how to set up ads).
• Know your target audience: Each hotel has a specific target set of customers that they want to capture. A basic knowledge of your target audience is helpful when starting an ad campaign. If you are running a premium hotel, your target audience will include people from corporate sectors, businessmen, people on leisure trips and such likes.
• Keyword research: Keywords play an important role in starting a search ad campaign. They are phrases or words that align with what a searcher wants and will satisfy their query. You can select keywords based on which queries you want to display alongside your ad. If you’ve done SEO for your hotel website, you’ll be having an idea on the keywords you want to target.

When running a business, you have an idea of what your audience will search for. Similarly, the knowledge of people’s needs becomes your keywords and help you reach your target audience in a better way. Google suggests keywords when setting up the campaign. Choose the most relevant ones for your hotel.

Now let’s go ahead and see how to set up and start running Google ads for your hotel.

How to set up Google Ads for your hotel?

Honestly speaking, setting up a Google ads account and running ads is an extremely easy exercise.

I know, you might have various doubts and questions in this, but once we go through the step-by-step process, I am sure you’ll get a clear idea on how it works and what it includes.

Step 1 – Creating your ad account

Go to Google Ads homepage, and create new Google Ads account. It is recommended to use your hotel’s official email address or the one which is active, as you’ll get all your Google Ads related updates and suggestions on this email.

This is what will happen when you click on “Start Now” button on the Ads homepage.

Step 2 – Choose your advertising goals

Once you’re signed in to your ads account, you’ll be asked to select your advertising goals.

Why do you want to run ads? What is the purpose? Set your preferences here.

Hotels need to determine why they are setting up the ad, viz; to get more calls, get more website sales or sign ups (bookings here) or get more visits to your physical location.

If you have your hotel website, we’d recommend you to choose the 2nd option. If not, option 1 would also work well.

Step 3 – Describe your business

Start describing your business in this step. Mention your property (business) name and add the link to your website.

Step 4 – Select your target audience

In this step, mark locations where there are probable customers for your hotel and where do you get maximum guests from.

This step has two aspects:

1. Find out how much audience can you capture at a particular location. Google shows that figure in the box on the right.
2. Mention the geographical location where you want your ad to show up. For example, if you select India, Australia, Canada etc; people who are searching for hotels in these locations will see your ads based on the keyword selection.

It is a good practice to target audience from your neighbouring cities in the beginning. You can then expand the locations gradually.

Choose your locations wisely. Otherwise, you may end up spending a fortune on ads without gaining much.

Step 5 – Add your business specifications (for streamlined target audience)

Once you have determined the locations you want your ad to show up, the next step asks for your business category. This narrows down your target audience to ensure that your ads reach the right kind of people.

This step also lets you choose the language you want to show your ad in. If you’re offering specific services or amenities at your property which you’d like to promote in the ad, you can add those here. This is so that the searchers see your specialties, which increase their chances of booking your property.

Google also suggests you few of these services based on your business category.

Step 6 – Writing the ad

Google suggests you few ready-made ads based on the description and information you provided so far. These ads will be visible to searchers when they search with a keyword mentioned in your ad.

You’re also required to add the link/URL where your ads would lead to. Here, since we wanted more website sign ups, I’ve added the resort’s website link.

Thus, if anyone clicks on your ad, he/she will be lead to your website.

See the suggestion that the campaign page gave for Avalanche Resort.

As a beginner, you don’t have to design an ad in fancy words or even worry about how to create an ad.

If you’d like to write or add more ad copies from your end, you can do that. Here are some free ad copy templates which you can use to create your ads.

Step 7 – Set your budget

Here is the game changer! Based on all the preferences, locations that you have selected in the previous steps, Google gives you a daily budget of running the ads and an estimate number of clicks and impressions to be received per month.

Do keep in mind that this amount is to be paid ONLY WHEN people click on your ad or call your business (basically when any action is taken on your ad).

Don’t worry, you can modify this budget any time.

That is how PPC for hotels or Pay per click ads are set up and work in Google. This amount varies per click, but rest assured, it won’t go beyond the monthly limit set.

Step 8 – Review your settings

Name your campaign, review all the parameters and settings you selected in all the previous steps, and that’s it! You are ready to roll.

If you have missed things or want to change settings, you can go back to that particular step to do so. You’ll be able to review them again on this step before setting up your billing.

Step 9 – Set up billing information

Now, since you are all set to launch your first ad campaign with Google Ads, provide your contact information and payment details to start the campaign right away.

The screenshots will help you in knowing how can the payment be done.

Clicking on submit will start your ad and you will be able to reach more people in no time!

Now that we’ve set up our ad campaign, let’s move ahead to the next important part of running ads. Tracking and analysing conversions.

How to track conversions from Google Ads?

So, you’ve set up Google Ads for your property and you’re all excited to see how they work out.

Though, often we miss to see how our applied strategies work and keep on implementing them without any further thought process. Though, you CANNOT do the same with ads.

Here’s how you can track conversions from your Google Ads.

Step 1 – Go to conversion tracker

In your Google Ads account, go to Tools & Settings -> Select the “conversions” option.

You will see the conversion actions that you can pick up from this tab. Enable all and from the list that comes up, select the conversions you want to track.

Since we have not set up any conversion actions in this account uptil now, we need to create a new conversion action.

Step 2 – Create conversion action

Google Ads tracker guides you to select the conversion action for your website. Since our ad adjective was to get more website sign ups and sales, we can go ahead and select the first option.

If you want to (or have already) set up another ad campaign to get more phone calls, you can select the third option.

There are various aspects that have to be considered and entered here. To start with, you need to select the action you want to track on your website. Do you want to track purchase, lead (when contact information is shared), page view, or a sign up (someone registering for newsletter or so) or entirely something else.

Let’s say we want to track leads received on the hotel website from our ads. We’ll consider leads as bookings here or even inquiries.

Next, you’ll be asked to name your conversion and select a few parameters of your conversion action.

Step 3 – Setting up tag

Tag is a code which you need to set up on your website using which Google will track your conversions on your website from ads whenever the selected action has taken place.

We have selected leads as the conversion action. So if a website visitor who landed on your website from your ad, shares his contact information; it will be tracked through this tag.

Google Ads analyser gives you options to embed the tag yourself, share it via email to your website developer or through Google Tag Manager. Install this tag on every page of your website.

Set up the global site tag on your entire website to add visitors to your remarketing list. That is, if a visitor lands leaves your website without performing any action, Google will target them to visit your website again through ads which show on the third-party websites they visit.

Select the event snippet which works with the global site tag. That is, do you want to consider a click on your website page as an event? Or page load as an event?

And here, we’re done setting up the conversion action. The conversions from your ads will be tracked as per the instructions you set above.

After implementing all these steps, you’ll be able to run any kind of Google ads for your property and track their performance.

Answering your FAQs on Google Ads

In conclusion

To begin with, setting up Google ads for your hotel is a simple process and should be kept such without complicating much.

You should start running your ads on Google by investing less amount in the campaigns. Patience is the key to reach an ideal conversion rate from Google Ads.

When the world is using Google for entertainment and other purposes, why not reach the masses through the same platform and make your business known worldwide.

When you compare the costing of these ads with your other marketing strategies, you may find these ads pocket friendly and easy to set up. They are the apt platform to register your business in people’s minds and maximize your revenue gradually.

Start running Google Ads for your property and see how they perform. If you have any questions, or would like to know more about this, do let me know in the comment section below.

The post How to Set Up Google Ads for Your Hotel: A Step-by-step Guide appeared first on eZee Absolute.