If there is a topic coming back often in my personal Facebook group, during my free consultation calls with Superhosts and in other groups for vacation rental owners, this is how to use Facebook ads to promote vacation rentals and Airbnb listings.
If you have a Facebook business page, you probably get often this notification from Facebook “you can reach more people, boosting this post”. The question is: how to do it efficiently and make the money you spend on the ad worth it?
As I said last week in a live training about tools to have to optimize your website, if you are doing promotion online but you don’t check your analytics or don’t know how to analyze it, let’s be honest: you are wasting your money.
Before diving into our subject today, let me remind you one point before you run your Facebook ad and even as soon as you have a Facebook business page linked to your website: have a Facebook Pixel to control your website analytics from Facebook.
Now, instead of talking from my point of view, I decided to let a Superhost Roy tell you about his own experience with Facebook ads.
Let’s see know how he succeeded get more bookings for his Airbnb vacation rentals run Facebook ads.
1. Tell us a little about yourself and how you got started doing Airbnb ?
I moved to the Philippines as a missionary to start a Sunday School in a small fishing village. We soon established the Sunday School and put up a kubo (hut) on the beach.
I decided to try listing it on Airbnb and just see if we could rent it out for some extra income.
It was a success. We built another kubo and then in partnership with my wife’s family, a small beach resort.
I created a Facebook page for both places as well as a managed website.
2. Why did you start using Facebook ads to promote your Airbnb?
I first started using FB ads to drive people to my Airbnb page as an experiment to test the response.
By the way, have you seen that I created a full course on how to get bookings on Social Media for your short term rental?
Get it now at a great price!
3. How do you target well the Facebook ads you run for your vacation rental?
FB has a very good feedback system for the ad performance.
From it, I defined my target audience based on gender, age, location and interests.
For instance my target audience is 18-35 year old females who love the beach or sunsets or swimming or swimwear etc..
My initial ads were to a wide audience in the Philippines.. the results taught me that 80% of my response came from this group, so I targeted subsequent ads at that group specifically and my response rate shot up. Over 30% on occasion!!
4. What do you think is important when doing Facebook ads to make the investment worth it for vacation rentals?
As I said, the most important is to define your audience based on the FB feedback.
Check out this post to see how to target efficiently your ads
5. What were your biggest mistakes with FB ads?
At first, my ads targeted to too wide a group or overseas. This did not give me much of a response. I tried a few iterations and all were not effective.
7. What the return on investment you got from doing FB ads?
As high as 50:1
8. In which situations are you using FB ads ?
I am using them for last-minute bookings, low-season bookings, high-season bookings, raise engagement, get more followers.
9. Your five top tips when doing FB ads for a short term / vacation rentals?
- 1. Know your target audience
- 2. If the ad is not working don’t wait .. kill it and do a new one.
- 3. Use a good guest review as the basis for your ad.
- 4. Offer something unusual.. for instance romantic dinner on the beach or free breakfast as a promo
- 5. Use FB to promote your Airbnb listing to people who might not otherwise see it.
10. Do you promote your Airbnb any other ways?
One of the things I do is invite bloggers to come and stay for free.
The local online press will sometimes pick us up.
I do TV interviews and invite celebrities to come and stay for free.
By the way, have you seen that I created a full course on how to get bookings on Social Media for your short term rental?
Get it now at a great price!
Here in the Philippines one celeb with a million or more followers can come to visit our place and suddenly we cant keep up with the requests.
Our FB page has been successful as well with over 35000 likers by now.https://www.facebook.com/casaangelinaamores/
I post my Superhost updates to my FB personal page.
I created the host page which has a brief bio and all of my listings on it. I copy paste that link in much of my correspondence whether email or FB messenger
I also created an IG page @casaangelinaresort
Ready to apply Roy’s tips to run facebook ads for your Airbnb vacation rentals?
By the way, a big part of the revenue from their resort is going to the construction of a new church in the village in the Philippines. If you want to have amazing holidays and help a good cause, be sure to wishlist his place!
Do you want to see what looks like this resort, have a look below!
Please remember to pin it!
I’m Natacha, a French vegan Airbnb host who has been working online for the past 4 years. I help hosts stand out and make more money online so they can have a good work-life balance!
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