Facebook has launched a new travel advertising feature called Trip Consideration that helps you target people who are planning their next holiday but haven’t yet decided where to go. In today’s blog we take a look at what it has to offer and how you can use it to capture high-quality leads at the earliest stage of their travel plans.
The network already has features to help you reach people planning to visit specific locations, or travellers already in your location, but its new Trip Consideration feature means you can promote destinations to users while they’re deciding where to go on their next travel adventure.
Facebook announced Trip Consideration earlier this month, telling us the new feature will be rolling out gradually across advertising accounts. If you can’t see the ad delivery option in your Ads Manager dashboard now, you should see it over the coming weeks. You’ll find it under Budget & Schedule when you create a new ad, in the Optimize for Ad Delivery section.
Hit the toggle switch for Prioritize delivery to people who plan to travel and you’re good to go.
At this point, you might be wondering what Trip Consideration has to offer over other targeting and delivery options. Well, the simple answer is it allows you to pinpoint travellers at the earliest stage of the booking process – before they’ve even decided where they want to go.
This means you can use Trip Consideration to get your ad seen by people who are actively looking at travel locations but haven’t set their hearts on where to go. Once people have made this decision, the majority of travellers are no good to you; most of them are going to a destination you don’t operate in.
However, if you can use Trip Consideration to get people excited about a location relevant to your brand, you’ve just got yourself a valuable lead. This decision process is something every traveller goes through, too, which means Trip Consideration gives you the chance to turn any traveller into a potential customer.
If you’re already using Google Ads in your travel marketing strategy (and you should be), the ability to target travellers before they’ve decided where to go is nothing new. However, you’ll also know how big a deal it is to be able to do the same thing on Facebook and Instagram – two massive platforms for travel marketers.
Here’s how Facebook described the new feature in its announcement:
“We know this type of travel discovery and trip planning is already happening across our platforms. In fact, 68% of millennials found ideas for their most recent trip on Facebook, and the same is true for 60% of millennials on Instagram. That’s why we wanted to give travel advertisers a way to reach people where they’re already finding inspiration for their next trip.
Now, with Trip Consideration, you can showcase deals and popular destinations to encourage people to book their next vacation at a specific destination. For example, let’s say a college student has demonstrated interest in spring break at the beach by browsing travel related pages, but has not yet settled on a specific location. Travel advertisers can now deliver ads promoting flight or hotel deals to inspire the student to book his or her trip.”
As the network says, Facebook and Instagram help a majority of travellers decide where they want to go next and the visual aspect of both networks makes them a powerful tool for travel marketers. Having the ability to hone in on people who haven’t decided where they want to go yet and influence this decision means you can capture leads at the earliest stage of the booking process and nurture them along the way.
To help you get the best out of Trip Consideration, Facebook is suggesting a number of best practices. You can find these on the Facebook Business page for the new feature but here’s what the network has to say:
We recommend selecting a broad audience when using trip consideration; using small audience sizes or narrow targeting may result in poor delivery. To get the best results, we recommend using an audience size of 7M or larger. You may use Trip Consideration in combination with your existing targeting (such as interest targeting or Lookalike Audience targeting) but again, we recommend maximising your audience size whenever possible.
Under the website conversion objective, we recommend optimising for search, initiate checkout or purchase events.
We recommend starting with autobid, as this will help to maximise delivery. If your campaign is delivering well after three days (fulfilling 80% or more of your daily budget), you can test specific bid targets if the cost per conversion is above your target.
We recommend utilising Trip Consideration as an always-on campaign strategy. We will continue to optimise for people with travel intent so by running Trip Consideration on an always-on basis, you will increase your potential for reaching people who are newly demonstrating intent to travel.
We recommend measuring the success of Trip Consideration by evaluating the impact on the event you are optimising for. For instance, if you are optimising for search events, we recommend evaluating success based on cost per search and the volume of searches.
The creative options available for Trip Consideration are static image, carousel, single video, or collection. There are many types of creative that can be successful with the use of Trip Consideration, and some examples include showcasing a carousel of popular destinations or travel deals, displaying various types of trips that people can take, such as beach vacations or hiking trips, or using inspirational travel creative that highlights the value proposition of your brand. We recommend testing various creative options to improve performance.
You’ll also want to keep user intent in mind when you’re creating ad campaigns for Trip Consideration. Remember these are people who are still deciding where they want to go so their desires are very broad at this point. They’re not looking for hotel rooms or things to do in a specific location; they’re more likely to be deciding what kind of holiday they want.
They could be looking for the best locations to travel to at this time of year, for example, or wondering whether to hit the beach or slopes for a couple of weeks. Alternatively, they could be craving some sun but haven’t decided where to go, and so could be convinced to visit Krabi in Thailand over closer alternatives in the Mediterranean. Or you could be targeting couples preparing for their wedding day and haven’t yet decided where to go for their honeymoon.
Keep this in mind when you’re creating your campaigns and remember you can use Trip Consideration with other targeting options – like Life Events to pinpoint couples who have just announced their engagement.
Above all, Trip Consideration is designed to help you capture leads at the earliest stage of their travel plans, so craft your campaigns and messages accordingly.
That should cover everything you need to know about using Trip Consideration on Facebook and Instagram. If you need more help with this new feature or how to implement it in your wider advertising strategy, get in touch with our travel marketing experts today.
For an in depth guide on Facebook advertising, visit How to advertise on Facebook
Michelle joined Vertical Leap in 2011 as Marketing Manager, having spent the previous 15 years of her marketing career in the recruitment, leisure and printing industries. Her passions include dogs, yoga, walking, cycling, the beach, mountains and tapas.
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Categories: PPC, Social Media
Categories: Social Media, Travel