Open the Facebook or Instagram ad you are paying for right now and find one setting: its objective. Not the photo, not the budget. The objective.
That one setting tells Meta what to go and get for your money, and it is easy to set once and never look at again.
What the objective decides
Meta describes its Engagement objective as the one for getting more messages, video views, post engagement or event responses. It describes its Traffic objective as the one for sending people to a destination, such as your website or a landing page. You can read both in Meta’s own words on its Engagement objective page and its Traffic objective page. Each suits a different job.
If the job is getting a guest onto your booking page, a reaction does not do it. A person can react to a photo of your pool and never look at a room rate. A post can look popular and still leave your calendar empty.
The fix: match the objective to the job
This takes about ten minutes:
- Open the campaign in Meta Ads Manager and read the objective it was created with. If someone else set it up, ask them.
- Write down the one thing you want the ad to do. For most small properties it is a visit to a page where the guest can see rates and book.
- Check the objective is one built for that job, and that the ad sends people to your booking page or the page one step before it, not to a post.
- If it does not match, set up your next campaign with the right objective. If it does match, ask the person running it why they chose it. There can be good reasons, and Meta lists other objectives for other jobs.
Be honest about what a click is. A click on an ad is a visit, not a booking. The objective gets people to the door, and counting what happens next is its own job. The link-tagging trick from our post on the direct bookings your analytics never shows you works on the address your ad sends people to as well. Tag it, and if your booking engine reports sources you can see those visits as their own line.
What you will see
Over the next campaign you have two numbers to put side by side: what you paid, and how many visits reached your booking page. Either way you stop paying for a number that looks busy and start paying for one you can hold up against your bookings.
What this is one piece of
Picking the right objective is one fix, and it is worth doing this week whoever runs your ads. It sits beside our post on counting the taps it takes to book you on a phone.
The objective is the first setting, not the whole job. The ad still needs a photo that stops a thumb, an audience trimmed as results come in, and a page that loads quickly on a phone. Then there is a booking engine that takes a booking in a few taps, and someone watching the cost every week. Ongoing work like that is what Boost Direct is built for. It is our fully managed marketing for accommodation providers: website, SEO, paid advertising on Google and Meta, social media and ongoing support from a team that keeps optimising, on a flat fee or a performance-based model. If you would rather keep running your ads yourself, this post and the ones after it are written for you too. The rest of what we do is on our services page.
Open your ad tonight and read its objective.
Book a free Boost Direct Accelerator session
Summer starts on 1 December, less than four weeks away, and whatever your ads and website are doing now is what the first holiday enquiries will find. Book a free Boost Direct Accelerator session and we go through your property with you: a keyword plan for how guests search for you, a report on where you rank, a review of your website’s speed and SEO, and a look at what stops visitors booking.
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