Best Practices for Facebook Campaign Delivery — Travel Edition
In our last post, we reviewed general best practices for ensuring successful campaign delivery on Facebook. Today, we want to delve a little bit deeper into travel-specific concerns. As a travel advertiser on Facebook, we do not need to tell you about the challenges of the traveler’s path to purchase, multi-channel effects, seasonality, dynamic fares, product lifetime, measurement and attribution, and the list goes on. Travel is a very unique vertical, demanding more customized solutions and quite tedious planning and tracking processes. In order to offset some of the marketing frenzy of the holiday season, we’ve put together a list of campaign delivery specifics that should be on every travel advertiser’s agenda.
As we’ve worked with advertisers to transition to Facebook’s Dynamic Ads for Travel, we’ve taken note of some technical issues that tend to accompany the retargeting solution. For DAT campaigns to work and deliver properly, a thorough technical setup is critical.
Product Feeds
You can run DAT campaigns for three travel verticals: Hotels, Flights and Destinations. First and foremost, all the products available on the advertiser’s website or app need to be on their product feed. The feed requirements vary among catalogs in the separate verticals. Some fields are “mandatory” and must be filled in for all row entries. After the feed is complete and uploaded, Facebook will check for errors. It is important to double-check and correct all Facebook warnings for your campaigns to run seamlessly. If any of the given fields are invalid or missing, Facebook will not serve ads for that product. Please refer to our DAT guide for more information on how to set up your feeds and get started.
You can find a list of common feed errors and how to fix them in the table below:
Pixel Issues
Facebook’s Dynamic Ads rely on pixel (for websites) and SDK (for mobile apps) tracking. Pixel and SDK integration allow Facebook to capture user intent, including the products they are interested in and where they are in the purchase funnel. In order to fine tune your tracking, it is important to define all of the events in your purchase funnel. Pixels and SDKs must fire all of the defined events correctly with relevant parameters in order to track conversions.
Issues associated with pixel integration can affect campaign delivery.
Make sure that every pixel and SDK is associated with a product catalog. Otherwise, Facebook will not be able to match users with the products they’ve shown interest in, and you will receive the following error: “Your catalog isn’t attached to an event source.” In some cases, you may not receive an error but audience sizes will be smaller than expected.
Product match rate
When your feed and pixels are ready to go, the next step is checking the product-catalog match rate. Facebook tracks when pixels are triggered on your website (ie. every time someone interacts with a product or performs an event). The match rate shows the percentage of products or events in your catalog that have triggered the associated pixel on your website. In other words, the product-catalog match rate is a good indicator of whether there are events or products on your website that are missing from your catalog.
You can check the match rate from Business Manager > Catalog Manager. By selecting the catalog you want to view, you will be directed to the Events page for that catalog. The two key insights you will find here are Unique Products and Total Events. Unique products refers to the number of unique products or events on your website that have triggered the pixel. Total events refers to the total number of times that the pixel has been triggered (by Unique Products).
Template URL
DAT aims to target travelers who are interested in a hotel or flight destination and direct them to a customized and relevant landing page. Therefore, the specific destination URLs should either be defined on the feed or via the template URL. Customization with template URL enables advertisers to autofill the landing page with information relevant to the traveler’s search parameters and previous activity, such as their check-in date or destination airport.
Travel Audience Setup
On DAT campaigns, creating custom travel audiences is a good way to narrow your targeting. You have the option to customize based on the actions potential travelers have taken on your website or app as well as search criteria, such as retention and booking window. While this means that you can deliver more relevant ads, you should be cognizant of your audience sizes. If your targeting conditions end up narrowing the size of your audience too much, it will affect the delivery of your campaign. In this case, it may be a good idea to broaden the criteria of your custom travel audience. Let’s say you have initially tried targeting travelers who are scheduled to check-in within 30 days. If you see that the size of this travel audience is not sufficient, try changing this to 90 days, like we’ve done in the example below. Refer to the next section for general tips about audience size and how much is too much.
Audience Size
When defining the ad set structure for your campaign, we recommend splitting ad sets in order to exploit possible differences in performance among your target audiences. However, this is a highly sensitive issue because over-splitting may cause under-delivery due to low reach. An easy rule of thumb for ensuring that your audience size is sufficiently targeted but not over-split is obtaining at least 10 conversions per ad set per day. We recommend broadening the reach of an ad set in your campaign if you are not observing this minimum. Otherwise, you will not have sufficient data to draw conclusions from the results of your campaign.
Optimization Goal
Choosing the right optimization goal for your campaigns is critical for all Facebook advertisers, regardless of their vertical. That said, it is slightly more ambiguous when it comes to travel. This is because optimal strategy and campaign structure varies widely even among travel advertisers, depending on each brand’s objective and definition of a conversion. Therefore, as a travel advertiser, you need to first understand your purchase funnel and identify which event in the funnel is most valuable to you. In turn, you should set your optimization goal accordingly. For performance campaigns, we recommend setting a conversion optimization goal. In doing so, please make sure to also select your conversion event and conversion window. This way, Facebook delivers your ads based on your performance metrics.
Bidding and Seasonality
Just like all other Facebook ads, DAT also participates in Facebook’s auction, and bids in the auction may largely fluctuate in months when competition is high. Therefore, we strongly suggest that you consider seasonality and competition when running your ads. For example, let’s say you set manual bids for your ads. It is likely that throughout the course of an always-on campaign like DAT, the suggested bids will increase during high season. The manual bids that you have previously set will no longer be competitive enough to win auctions, and consequently your ads will under-deliver. Identifying and managing fluctuations in competition is a tedious feat. This is why our Data Science team continues to invest in solutions that do this for you. Our AI-powered marketing assistant, Marvin scopes out the dynamics of the auction for you and manages bids and budgets accordingly. Meanwhile, Dynamic Ads Optimizer was built specifically with travel advertisers in mind, enabling them to further optimize on seasonality. Please get in touch with us if you’d like to learn more.
Because the traveler path-to-purchase is high-touch and significantly more complex than traditional consumer behavior, getting Facebook right for travel has a host of implications. Not only are the considerations that we’ve discussed here key to ensuring that your DAT campaigns are delivering, but they also play a role in understanding your audiences. Understanding how your brand is integrated in the travel cycle is invaluable for deriving actionable insights. We recommend that all travel advertisers allocate resources to proper campaign setup. Feel free to reach out to our Customer Success team from hello@adphorus.com to make sure your campaigns are live and well and driving meaningful results.
