There’s a time and a place for traditional display and search advertising, but in many cases remarketing might be a more suitable approach. Let’s take a look at how analytics and remarketing – and their synergy potential – can help you create better digital advertising campaigns for your hotel or travel business.
What Is Analytics?
To find out all about analytics, head over to our Introduction to Google Analytics, which covers all the basics and answers questions like ‘what is it, what does it do, and do you need it on your website?’. Don’t forget to come back to this blog post afterwards though.
What Is Remarketing?
Remarketing, also called retargeting, allows you to show digital ads to people who have previously visited your website. So, rather than just targeting a potential guest by age, location, interests etc, you can very narrowly specify that you only want your ad to be shown to users who have at least heard of your business before. Perhaps they went to your home page and didn’t have time to dive any deeper. Or they went to your rooms page but realised they need to double-check the dates with their partner or family. Or they browsed through your blog but weren’t at the right stage of the buyer cycle just yet.
Remarketing doesn’t only allow you to target people who have visited your website in general – it lets you narrow it down on a URL and events basis, i.e. certain actions users have taken on your website. So you can either target someone who’s visited any of your rooms pages (…/rooms/…) or specifically looked at the couples spa package (…/spa/couples-weekend). This way you can adjust your messaging and images depending on which page they visited. For example, you wouldn’t want to show an adventurous family photo to someone looking to book a quiet spa break (hopefully?).
How Do Analytics And Remarketing Synergise?
But – and this is key – remarketing doesn’t work without data. Luckily it is very simple to add the relevant tracking code to your website, either using Google Tag Manager or adding it directly to the code base. Either way, Umi Digital are happy to help. Once the code is added and the desired pages are specified in Google Ads or the Facebook Business Manager, it can start collecting additional data about your users. Having this data results in a number of benefits, such as:
- You can reach potential hotel guests at the right stage of the buyer cycle
- By including and excluding users in many different ways, the ads are hyper-targeted
- You know exactly where your money goes as the approach is much less scattergun
Remarketing Lists For Search Ads (RLSA)
Remarketing does not only work for display ads, it also has huge potential for search ads, i.e. the ads you see at the top of a Google search results page. By combining traditional search advertising and remarketing, you end up with something called Remarketing Lists for Search Ads, or RLSA. For example, these lists allow you to only show an ad to someone who searches for the term ‘festive afternoon tea’ AND has visited your website before. This will especially appeal to users in the consideration stage of the buyer cycle, as your hotel will already be in their consideration set of suitable options – also known as the evoked set. Take this opportunity to go after competitive search terms as they will have a higher chance of ROI than targeting them ‘cold’. Generally speaking, conversion rates of ads are higher if there has been a previous touch point.
Dynamic Remarketing With Google Ads
To take it an extra step further, you can upgrade your campaign to a dynamic remarketing campaign, which allows you to be even more targeted in your marketing approach. It works by collecting additional data and attaching it to your user’s anonymous profile set in the cookie. It allows hotels to remarket at a product level rather than the brand or topic level. To read all about dynamic remarketing, head over to our previous blog post, Traditional Remarketing vs Dynamic Remarketing.
So, Should I Use Remarketing?
In short, yes. Remarketing is very cost-effective as it’s a much ‘warmer’ approach to digital advertising. Of course, decide on a case-by-case basis if digital ads are the right channel for you at this time (probably yes). But setting up the functionality in the background is an absolute must.
We’re happy to help – just email us on support@umidigital.co.uk or ring +44 203 642 5898. Or if you’re an existing client (hello!), just let us know during our next chat.