Facebook Retargeting: What All Tour Operators Should Know

Say you have a prospective customer that visits your tour and activity website and browses the different tours that you have for about 15 minutes. Disappointingly, they close their browser without ever finalizing their booking, and you fear that you won’t see that customer on one of your tours during their upcoming trip. However, with retargeting on social media sites such as Facebook, you may be able to capture their attention once again and ultimately secure their booking.

What is Retargeting?

Retargeting is an online marketing technique that can be used by tour and activity operators who want to boost their conversion rates on their website. Ultimately, these tactics are designed to bring back individuals who previously visited your website but did not book a tour. Retargeting also helps you improve your allocation of marketing resources and understand what is driving the bookings on your website.

Cross-Device Capabilities: The Typical Route for Booking

The path that leads to a booking is not always straight. In fact, many potential travelers go through a variety of steps before they ultimately end up back on your website to book their tour and activity. The typical route is as follows:

• Prospective travelers use popular search engine sights such as Google to explore different destinations.
• After deciding on a destination, they may look at the different websites for various tour and activity operators.
• The browser saves the Facebook login information of the individual and notes their search engine activity.
• When a user pulls up Facebook on their phone, they will see ads for your tours and activities.
• The user sees the ad on their device, and clicks it to get back to your website.
• Once they are on the site, they finalize their booking.

Best Practices for Retargeting on Facebook

In order to effectively retarget your customers on Facebook, you need to identify the prospective travelers that are most likely to book with you. You should first identify the 5 percent of web visitors that are most interested in your products. These are the people who are most likely to book one of your tours, and therefore they are the best place to invest your resources.

You also should retarget your customers based on location. Identify the places from which most of your travelers originate, and focus your retargeting efforts on those regions of the world. This allows you to place your online advertisements where they count.

Use promo codes and discounts in order to entice travelers to finalize their booking. If they visited your site once but didn’t book, consider offering them a 15 percent discount in your Facebook ad. This may be all the encouragement they need to complete their reservation.

Retargeting can help you boost your direct bookings and also increase your ROI for your online marketing campaigns. It’s an easy way to remind your previous web visitors that they had been considering your tours, and to give them an opportunity to quickly finalize their preferred booking. For more information on the best way to use online marketing techniques to increase the bookings at your tour and activity company, download the Rezdy online marketing ebook now.