Beyond Metasearch: Facebook's Dynamic Ads for Travel

At Koddi, we’ve always been humbled by how often our clients lead our evolution into new features and offerings. When we do incredible work, clients proactively bring new opportunities to us and ask us to expand our technical expertise.

A few months ago, clients began asking us to power more of their dynamic display campaigns. We have great access to rates, we have some of the best hotel content in the entire world, and we have a rich history in distributing structured data. Match that up with an incredibly fast, reliable, and dynamic reporting system, and there are the makings of something special.

Today we’re excited to announce our full support for a new ad format that we believe has the potential to change the digital travel advertising ecosystem: Facebook’s Dynamic Ads for Travel. Dynamic Ads for Travel (DAT) combines some of the targeting capabilities we’ve been yearning for since our earliest days in metasearch with a clean, rich, and extensible dynamic ad experience.

How does DAT differ from Dynamic Ads?

Screen Shot 2016-05-10 at 6.41.54 AMDAT is a specialized extension of Facebook’s Dynamic Ads (DA) solution. DA connects product content, visitor behavior, targeting, and cross device reporting and optimization to deliver highly relevant and engaging ad experiences. Historically, it has been tailored for advertising e-commerce products.

Intrepid and innovative travel advertisers – including more than a few of our clients – have been hacking DA to work for flights and hotels for some time. While DA is an awesome product (and we’ll continue to support it in Koddi!) there are a few things that travel marketers have been asking for that haven’t been possible until now.

Rich support for Travel content

Before DAT was supported, advertisers had to fit as much content as they could into Facebook’s product specification, which was built for e-commerce. Now, Facebook supports rich and detailed information about travel itineraries that is highly relevant to travelers. Hotels can now be described with details around location, property type, star rating, local neighborhoods and more. Review summaries and details can be shared along with real-time availability and pricing information. Advertisers will be able to leverage this content in ads but it also has long term benefits to optimization, where the more information available about an itinerary, the better experience advertisers and Facebook will be able to deliver.

Better user targeting and tracking

Advertisers can now pick up better signals from users around the trips they are taking: where are they traveling, what dates, how many guests, what price ranges they’re looking in, what features they are looking for, and more. These features allow advertiser to deliver more relevant content to users and engage them more effectively.

More dynamic experiences throughout the trip

Now that more content is available and advertisers have access to enhanced targeting tools, they can deliver more meaningful experiences to users at key points in the booking process. When customers are still researching, brands can deliver content that inspires. When customers are narrowing down their choice for an imminent trip, brands can show specific and extremely relevant offers. On the trip, brands engage customers with meaningful social content relevant to them in the moment. After checkout, there’s the opportunity to build loyalty, generate new content, or otherwise engage users in order to increase their lifetime value.

Benefits of Leveraging Koddi

Koddi is the leader in providing goal focused advertising technology for the hospitality industry. We have a knack for emerging channels that involve structured data and disparate data sources. We’re a blend of technologists and marketers, but in general just want to help our clients make smart and innovative decisions that improve their business.

We predict the most effective DAT advertisers will be experts at implementing specific and accurate tracking, provisioning rich property and image content, automating reporting and campaign management, and optimizing content and ad experiences at scale.

Tracking implementation expertise

To help launch clients efficiently and defect free so that they can make the most of this channel, we’ve developed tools and processes to get pixels online and QA’d quickly. Our team has implemented in straight code environments and through tag management platforms for some of the earliest DAT advertisers, and starting today we’re making that service broadly available.

Generating high quality property content

We’ve written before about the importance of great core data across travel advertising channels and Facebook is certainly no exception. Any client with active property content can now opt to generate a Travel Catalog for Facebook, one of the prerequisites for running DAT.

Because we know managing feed content and meeting the specs of various partners can be difficult and time consuming, we’ve added a handful of features to our property management processes, including validation and supplementation tools. This means that your feeds can actually come out of the system better than they went in. Properties running through Koddi can automatically have regions, neighborhoods and other content associated with them, enabling advertisers to better match dynamic ads to users and generate sales.

We’re also very excited to launch multi image support, categorization, and optimization for clients. This functionality allows us to better target images to users based on what we know about them to ensure the most engaging experience.

Screen Shot 2016-05-10 at 5.47.08 AM

Finally, the most difficult, time consuming, and often costly part of this experience is sharing dynamic rate data. Clients that are sharing rate data with us are now able to send their rates to Facebook with one click.

Reporting and automation

Our clients demand reliable, fast, and extremely granular reporting. They don’t want to just know how a campaign is performing; they want to understand how very precise segments of users are performing, how individual properties are performing, and how to tie demand and need to strategy. They want to understand where waste and opportunity exist and how to act on each situation.

To this end, Facebook Dynamic Ads reporting is now available in Koddi at all levels. If you already have access to an advertising account, it can be set up in minutes. All of our existing reporting interactions remain intact: the filtering and multidimensional support that our clients expect are all available for users.

Campaign management, optimization, and advanced features

Once an account is activated, users can leverage our campaign management tools to quickly launch a new DAT campaign and get ads out to users. Koddi is structured to automatically bring in reporting data associated with campaigns at the most granular level possible, enabling some really interesting campaign optimization options.

Users can access cross channel performance data in the platform to help determine how to market individual properties based on search trends, hotel needs, and goals. Our clients that leverage property, sub-brand, and coop or regional funding will also be able to deploy these dollars into DAT.

We’ve also developed and enabled support for bulk campaign and audience creation that will help save hours of setup time for sophisticated clients and enable intelligent testing and optimization. As with other channels, we’ll continue to create custom bid strategies that enable clients to maximize booking volume, returns, and profit.

Enabling Facebook Dynamic Ads for Travel in Koddi

It’s easy to get started in DAT. Koddi clients can start generating DAT campaigns immediately in the following steps:

  1. Authenticate your account
  2. Request pixel instructions
  3. Create and synchronize a DAT feed
  4. Create and Activate DAT campaign

If you have any questions about our support in DAT, please feel free to contact us or reach out through your account team.

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Koddi Updates , Social