Would you like to fill more seats on your next tour?
How would you feel about filling more seats with LESS effort?
Sounds great, right?
That’s where pixels come in. A pixel is a ‘behind the scenes’ snippet of code that will track potential clients who view your website. That information is then communicated to Facebook so that you can remarket directly to the individuals who have previously visited your website.
This may sound a bit technical but I promise that this is worth your time! Let’s explore some ways that pixels can work for your travel business.
Group Tour Impact
Let’s say you have a series of Facebook ads running that showcase different group tours or upcoming events. You can even target viewers who have looked at different ads over specific dates. This will work great if you have an ad running for 1 month showcasing an upcoming cruise group. Then the next month your ad showcases a coach tour of the Wild West.
Each month you can create a new audience of viewers for each of these tours. When downloading your new pixel audience select a date range so you can further remarket specific tour information to these people. Timing criteria here.
Pixel Audience Creation
Once your pixel has been in action for awhile and has started to accumulate date you can create an audience of Facebook and Instagram users who have taken some action and triggered your pixel.
To create an audience of these warm prospects you’ll navigate to your Business Manager < Ads Manager account and select Audiences. Follow the navigation in Figure 1,2,3 below.
Figure 1- Create your pixel audience here; Business Manager < Ads Manager < Assets < Audiences
Figure 2-Select Create Audience < Custom Audience
Figure 3 – Select Website Traffic
When you create your pixel audience you have some flexibility in it’s makeup. You’re able to choose the style of engagement your website visitors had with your page. To yield the largest audience you’ll select ‘All website visitors’ (see figure 4). If you want to create an audience only of people who visited a specific web page or blog post, you can target only those viewers (see the dropdown menu in Figure 4). This will give you a potentially smaller audience yet one that is hyper-engaged with specific content. Great for targeting only readers of a specific blog post or web page.
The other key option is to select the number of days you want people to stay in this audience after they’ve met the website traffic criteria. For example, if you want to set up an audience for your next cruise group, you can target only people who have visited a cruise page on your website within a certain date criteria. This is great if you’d like to target specifically to those who may be most interested in cruising.
Figure 4 – Set up audience parameters; actions and number of days
Facebook will then work it’s magic and create a hyper-targeted audience of prospects that you can use in upcoming ads. Remember you can create as many audiences as you’d like—no limit!
Target by Interests
Now imagine that you’d like to reach out to more people that have the same interests as the ones that have clicked your social ad and visited your website. You can create a Look Alike Audience in Facebook that has similar traits to your new pixel audience. Facebook helps you expand your potential client base by matching demographics and interests of your pixel audience and creating a new Look Alike audience for you. Sweet!
Once you’ve set up your original pixel audience, it’s simple to create a Look Alike Audience. Here’s how it works.
- Click on the audience you’d like to use as the foundation for your new Look Alike Audience. (Potentially your new pixel audience)
- A new template will open that looks like this. (see Figure 5 below)
- Select ‘Create Look Alike’ in the upper right corner
Figure 5 – Create a Look Alike audience from your original pixel audience.
Trip Consideration Audience
Did you know you can finesse these audiences even more by targeting people who are considering going on a trip? With the new Trip Consideration ad option you can refine your new pixel audiences to tease out and target people who are in the early stages of trip planning.
Not advertising yet?
Even if you haven’t created your first Facebook or Instagram ad yet, now’s a great time to set up your Facebook pixel as you can begin building awesome audiences to make your first ad even more successful.
Let’s put on our geek hats and embrace the future as marketing wizards. High-tech is now giving us more time to be high-touch while we put more ‘heads in beds’ and as many in our industry say ‘butts in seats’.
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About Catherine Heeg
Catherine Heeg is a recognized social media trail blazer passionate about social media and marketing in the tourism and hospitality industry. She takes the mystery out of marketing!
She creates and delivers meaningful, dynamic workshops that meet your unique needs in the Travel, Tourism & Hospitality Industry.
Catherine and her team help travel, tourism and hospitality pros design and implement social media marketing strategies and tactics that drive traffic to their social and web sites. Learn more…
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