How to Set Up Facebook Ads for Your Hotel: A Step-by-step Guide

Well, advertisements are an inevitable part of a hotel’s promotion and marketing. (By the way, here I’m talking about digital advertisements.) 

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.