How Can Tour Operators Use Retargeting Ads?

If you’ve been playing around with the online advertising space, you will probably have heard about something called “retargeting” advertisements.

Here’s a breakdown of what they are and what tour operators can do with them.

What is retargeting?

First things first. According to Adroll, 98% of your website visitors leave your site without buying anything. Retargeting is a type of advertising used to get all those website visitors to come back by serving them relevant ads.

It does this by keeping track of who has visited your site, displaying ads to them that hopefully gets them to revisit and make a booking.

Without getting too technical, people are tracked by attaching cookies to their browser for any page on your site. This is why it’s so powerful – you can actually segment your retargeting audience according to what pages they have been on. That way, you can exclude customers, and be very specific about which tours you display to them in ads.

You need to pay a retargeting software provider to do this.

Which sites do your retargeting ads get displayed on?

In essence, there are two big categories for where your retargeting ads get shown:

1) The World Wide Web

No matter where your visitor goes, websites that have signed up to a retargeting display network will be showing them your ads.

Examples:

Google’s Display Network is probably the biggest player.

2) Facebook (also known as FBX)

Facebook is very successful in terms of retargeting because people use it so often! The news feed ads are often the prime real estate being used for retargeted ads, but I’m sure you will have noticed the right-hand side ads as well.

Above is an ad I was served on my news feed. I’m a user of Hootsuite and log in every day – however I have never paid for it! So this is obviously an upsell style retargeting ad.

For tour operators, you could make each ad product specific. If someone viewed a particular page that displays a product catalogue (eg. Sydney Day Tours), you can show them an ad telling them to book your award-winning tour in Sydney. You would have to create one ad per catalogue in this case.

Or you can make it even more intuitive and segment by individual products! So if someone looked at your “Half-Day Dive” page, describe it to them in their news feed and again prompt them to make a booking. Remember to link back to the actual booking page so they don’t have to find it through your Home page.

What tools are out there?

Through Google Adwords, you can have access to Google’s Display Network. You can also retarget directly through Facebook. However, we recommend using one of the many retargeting platforms out there that give you access to both the web and Facebook Exchange.

Have a look at Adroll, Retargeter and, eBay Enterprise. They are the biggest software providers in this space.

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