In this guide, you'll find a list of best practices for setting up and running Facebook's travel ads solutions.

In this guide, you'll find the following resources:

• Pixel and app events
• Product sets
• Basic targeting
• Creative
• Optimisation
• Delivery

• Tips for promoting hotel inventory

Pixel and app events

The Facebook pixel is a piece of code for your website that enables you to measure, optimise and build audiences for your ad campaigns. Using the Facebook pixel, you can leverage the actions that people take on your website across devices to inform more effective Facebook advertising campaigns.

Below you'll find a set of tips and recommendations for using the pixel and app events with travel ads:

Use mobile and web

It's recommended that you set up tracking on both your website and your mobile app. On your website, you'll add the standard events for your pixel on key pages (e.g. search, purchase confirmation pages). On your app, you'll add app events to pages equivalent to those on your website. Setting up tracking will allow you to re-target people with ads after they took a specific action on your site. For example, if someone began the checkout process but didn't purchase, you can re-target them with the same inventory they were viewing and encourage them to complete their purchase.

Install the following events across key pages on your site and app

• Search: Add this event to all of your site or app's search results pages
• ViewContent: Add this event to all of your hotel or flight pages (e.g. hotel details page)
• InitiateCheckout: Add this event to the checkout page on your site or app (where people begin entering their personal/payment information). Don't add this to the payment confirmation page.
• Purchase event: Add this event to the purchase confirmation or thank you page that a customer sees after completing their transaction.

Because people spend a lot of time on mobile, app events often represent a large portion of traffic and travel bookings for advertisers. If you don't have app events implemented, you'll probably lose out on a large portion of re-targetable traffic and won't have visibility into any bookings that occur through your app.

Add the correct content IDs to your pixel and app event

For hotels and destinations:

Content IDs represent the products in your catalogue, and each product will have a unique ID. For travel ads, there are two options available for you to use:

• Content ID: Use content_ids when you want to match a specific hotel or destination that a person viewed on your website or app with the matching inventory in your catalogue.
• Destination ID: Use destination_ids in your search events when users search for hotels or flights in a particular destination. If you've captured this data, you can then re-target people who viewed these pages with either destination creative or hotel and flight creative.

Note: If you're running flight ads, content_ids and destination_ids are not required because flight inventory is described by the origin airport, destination airport, departure date (and return date if applicable) that a person searched for, so it is not necessary to use an additional unique ID to describe your flight inventory. However, if you plan to use both destination ads and flight ads, the destination_ids parameter will be required.

Associate your pixel or app event with your catalogues

Your pixel and app events must be associated with a product catalogue. If you're using multiple catalogues, double check to make sure that you've added the correct pixel and app event to the correct catalogue. After doing this, your ads will automatically show travel inventory based on customer behaviour on your website or app.

To associate your pixel/app event with a catalogue:

1. In your Business Manager, click Business settings on the left-hand side.
2. Click Catalogue settings.
3. In the Associate event source section, click Associate.
4. Tick the boxes next to the pixel or apps that you want to associate with your catalogue.
5. Click Save.

1. In your Business Manager, click Business settings on the left-hand side.
2. Click Catalogue settings.
3. In the Event sources section, click Edit.
4. You should see a list of available pixels and app events. You can see which ones have been ticked for the catalogue that you're viewing. Click Save if you make any changes.

Use app links for a better mobile experience

It's recommended that you use app links in your catalogue or set up template URLs in ad creation. Using these will allow users who click on your link to be deep-linked to specific pages that are relevant to their previous activity.

Use the following tools to help validate that your Facebook pixel and app events are working as expected and get help with troubleshooting errors.

• Facebook Pixel Helper: The Facebook Pixel Helper is a troubleshooting tool that helps you find out if your pixel is working correctly. It's a Chrome plugin that you can use to see if there's a Facebook pixel installed on a website, check for errors and understand the data that's coming from a pixel.
• Facebook app analytics: Facebook Analytics allows you to measure, understand and optimise the interactions that people have with your business across both devices and channels to help drive meaningful growth.
• Product catalogue checks: When you visit the Diagnostics tab of your product catalogue, you'll see a complete list of recommendations to fix and improve your catalogue. In the Product events tab, you can check your match rate, which is the number of events or unique products on your website or app that are in this catalogue, plus the number of events or unique products viewed on your website or app that were found in other catalogues, divided by the total number of events or unique products viewed on your website or app. Note: To use this tool, you must already have a product catalogue.

Check the health of your pixel periodically

• The number of pixel and app event fires should stay relatively stable across all of your standard events. If you see a dramatic drop in any of your standard events, use the tools mentioned above to check on the event and verify that there are no errors causing the change.

Product sets

A product set is a set of filters that's applied to the inventory in your catalogue. By defining a product set, you can limit the inventory that is available to be served in ads (for a particular ad set). For instance, for hotels you can create product sets based on the following filters: country, city, brand, base price and star rating.

Generally speaking, it is best to keep your product sets broad. An example of a broad product set would be one including all of your hotels, or all hotels in a specific country. If your product set is too narrow, you may experience under-delivery of your ads because there will be insufficient inventory that will be eligible to be served in your ads.

Basic targeting

With travel ads, you can use information from your pixel or app events to reach an audience of travellers with travel inventory that reflects where they are in their booking process.

Below you'll find tips for building your audiences:

Start with a simple audience

If you're new to travel ads, or preparing to run your first campaign, it's recommended that you keep your audience simple. Use the tips below to help you work out how to define your audience.

• Try targeting people who've searched, viewed content or initiated checkout on your website or app but haven't yet purchased.
• Don't use additional targeting (e.g. interest-based targeting).
• After you've run some campaigns with this simple targeting, use the performance metrics from the campaigns as a baseline before you add additional targeting or test narrower audiences.

Exclude purchasers:

• It's recommended that you exclude travellers from your audience who've already made a purchase within the given time period that you're targeting. Targeting people who've already booked hotels or flights with prompts to do so again may be a bad experience for your existing customers.

Expand an audience that's too narrow:

• As mentioned earlier, simple targeting is best – especially if you're new to running travel ads. Your ads may under-deliver if your audience is too narrow.
• If you're experiencing under-delivery, you should find ways to expand your audience. For instance, if you are using interest targeting on top of your retargeting audience, you should consider removing interest-based targeting. In general, interest targeting isn't recommended. If people are already shopping around on your website or app, you can assume that they're interested in your inventory.

Use a long retention window:

• Try using staggered retention windows, but avoid making these too narrow. If you're new to travel ads, try using a 0-7 day window and an 8-30 day window. For shorter windows, you'll want to use a higher bid because your more recent visitors may be more valuable because they are more likely to convert. For longer windows, you should consider using a lower bid. Note: Unless you have very high web or app traffic, we don't recommend creating narrow windows because they can lead to severe under-delivery.

Using booking window or travel date targeting:

Booking window and travel date targeting is only recommended for travel advertisers who have already run ads using simple targeting and have developed a performance baseline based on the results of those campaigns. This is because these targeting options will narrow your audience.

Always target all devices:

Don't create multiple campaigns that target people based on device. Doing so will limit Facebook's ability to optimise across devices to reach the people who are most likely to convert.

Show your ads across all available placements:

When creating your travel ads, it's recommended that you select every available ad placement. Selecting every ad placement will allow Facebook's delivery system to allocate your ad set's budget based on performance across the placements. If one placement begins to perform better (e.g. you can reach more of your audience for less in this placement), then the delivery system will automatically allocate more of the budget to this placement to help you reach more people.

Creative

Add dynamic pricing to your creative:

• Adding pricing information to your ad creative may lead to higher click-through rates for your ads.
• If you're using dynamic prices in your feed, you can show prices that are specific to the dates that people have already searched for.

Deep link to inventory in your app:

• Deep linking to specific inventory in your app is recommended and may lead to higher conversion rates.

Avoid updating your ad creative:

• Editing your ad creative after your ad is already running may cause the ad delivery optimisation models to reset. This may cause a temporary decrease in your campaign's performance.
• If you do edit your ad creative, expect some lost delivery time following the changes.
• Avoid making changes to your ad creative for time-sensitive campaigns (e.g. Christmas campaigns). If you need to make changes during these times, try to do so during low-traffic periods. If you're not sure when these low-traffic periods occur, we recommend going to Ads Manager and using the Breakdown filter to find this data. Within the breakdown filter, you can choose to breakdown your measurement results by:

  • Time of day (ad account time zone): This shows the breakdown of results based on the time of day in the ad account's time zone.
  • Time of day (viewer's time zone): This shows the breakdown of results based on the time of day in the time zone where the ad was viewed.
  • Day: This shows the breakdown of results by each day that your ads were active.

Optimisation

Try optimising for cost per click (CPC):

If you're new to travel ads, we recommend optimising for cost per click in the first ad campaigns that you run. To maximise delivery at the start of your campaign, you should set the bid to auto-bid. Over time, you should move away from auto-bidding and begin setting your bid based on how much you value a "click". Once you're happy with the results of those campaigns, try optimising for cost per impression next.

Optimising for cost per impression:

Before optimising for cost per impression, read the recommendations below.

• Your campaigns should have at least 15 conversions per week with a 1-day click attribution window in a given ad set.
• Bid your true value. If you've been optimising for cost per click (CPC), you may need to increase your bid amounts. To get an idea of the kind of bid you'll need when switching from CPC to oCPM, try this: divide your CPC by your average 1-day click conversion rate. For example, if you have a CPC of GBP 2 and a post-click conversion rate of 10%, then update your offsite conversion bid to GBP 2/0.1 = GBP 20 per conversion.

Other optimisation tips:

If you're spending your full daily budget and feel that your return on investment (ROI) and cost per action (CPA) performance are good, consider increasing your budget to increase delivery.

Delivery

Leave your campaigns running:

• Avoid pausing your ads after they've been running, making frequent change to creative or changing your bid.
• If changes are necessary, try making them infrequently. Additionally, make changes early in the day in your time zone versus later in the day. Making your changes early may help you avoid additional pacing issues.
• In general, ad delivery works best when your travel ads have run for a while. If you have an upcoming sale or are planning ads for the festive season and need to update your product sets or creative, try setting up your campaigns at least a week in advance and pausing them. On the day of your campaign, unpause your ads. With this strategy, you may see an immediate boost in performance compared to the performance that you'd see if you set your campaigns up the same day.

* Nguồn: Facebook