Rental Property PPC Agency

What is PPC Management for Vacation Destinations?

Vacation Property paid ads management consists of creating and optimizing paid advertisement campaigns for vacation destinations. However, that is an incredibly simple explanation, so let's dig a little deeper.

To provide professional PPC management, a PPC advertising company for vacation properties often starts by getting to know you. Since the way you approach paid ads for a local vacation destination is much different than how you would for a nationwide vacation property ecommerce brand, this information helps determine the next steps.

Local vacation destinations, for example, are often only looking for contact form submissions or calls. This can be accomplished through paid advertising that improves traffic to an optimized landing page or sales funnel. If those digital assets don't yet exist, or need substantial improvement, we recommend you start with Google Local Service Ads or Facebook Lead Forms.

Alternatively, ecommerce-minded vacation destinations tend to be interested in online sales. Using paid advertising, you can build traffic to a page optimized for products or categories. Google Shopping Campaigns might even make sense to include for some online businesses. Our sales funnels have also helped us to sell subscriptions, products, and services.

To optimize and scale vacation property PPC campaigns, it's important to understand what metrics will be used. For some vacation destinations, that means looking to platforms like Google Analytics. However, there are other options out there too, like Wicked Reports, Triple Whale, or Northbeam.

To be successful with paid advertising, your vacation destination should utilize multiple advertising plans and marketing tools. Pay-per-click campaigns for vacation properties should include strategies like:

• Get traffic from search engines, social networks, and third-party websites to your digital assets (websites, sales funnels, etc).
• Increase conversions for your vacation destination through qualified leads or online sales.
• Utilize third-party attribution software to better understand ad attribution.
• Present social proof through case studies, white papers, and video testimonials.
• Build and nurture relationships through user generated content, story creation, and email address collection.
• Test ad creatives across various ad placements and between different media formats.

Tips for Managing Paid Ads for Vacation Properties

Our team of paid advertising specialists is knowledgeable in the latest PPC trends for vacation properties and other industries.

Here are some of our best tips to follow for keyword research, audience research, landing page / sales funnel optimization, conversion rate optimization, and ad creation.

1.) Keyword Research Tips

In the context of paid advertising, keyword research for vacation properties largely relates to Google Ads and Bing Ads search campaigns. After all, Bing and Google only show ads based on what people search for that your vacation destination is targeting.

For example, a person searching for a vacation destination nearby might search "local vacation property" on a search engine. Knowing to target that exact phrase wouldn't require in-depth keyword research.

What if, however, that exact match keyword wasn't producing enough search volume and the vacation destination wanted to increase their traffic and conversions? To solve the problem, keyword research would be required.

Typically, the paid advertising manager will discuss with the vacation destination about what types of products / services to target more often. A broader keyword targeting strategy than exact matches might also be necessary.

Suppose the PPC manager discovers that there is high traffic volume for "nearby vacation destinations" or even "vacation property services." The first phrase is targeting a type of business or organization in the area. If the service is extensive, the second phrase might result in a more lucrative opportunity.

You can also benefit from keyword research when building out negative keyword lists. You can use negative keywords to prevent your PPC advertising from showing up in search queries that you know are not likely to result in more vacationers.

For example, a person searching for "free services from vacation destinations" or "how to advertise to vacation properties" is unlikely to convert with you. However, they might see your paid ads if you are using broad keyword targeting without any negative keywords like "free" or "advertise".

Even if your keyword research needs are obvious when you start building out your campaign, they become more complex as you scale your ads and reduce wasted ad spend.

2.) Audience Research Tips

When you hear audience research talked about for vacation destination paid advertising campaigns, it is often within the scope of scaling social ads on Facebook and Instagram. There are options within Google Ads and Bing Ads for audience targeting as well though.

We'll review some audience research and targeting history within Facebook Ads.

Vacation destination PPC advertising managers used Facebook's custom audiences extensively in the past. As a matter of fact, one of the most appealing features of Facebook Ads was its ability to collect data on users, which advertisers flocked to take advantage of.

A number of factors, including data privacy and machine learning, have had an impact on custom audiences over time.

In the iOS 14.5 update, Apple included a pop-up message that allowed users to opt out of tracking for personalized ads. The change negatively affected Facebook's ability to track user behavior. This even affected the accuracy of ad attribution reporting.

Then came improvements to their machine learning algorithms, which greatly diminished the need for custom audiences and lookalike audiences for most ad firms for vacation properties. With such sophisticated algorithms, it's often more harmful to choose your own interests compared to letting Facebook figure it out for you.

Though there will still be plenty of vacation destination paid advertising companies using custom audiences, the trend is moving toward broad targeting. You can see it in every update within Facebook Ads Manager as they slowly remove interest-based targeting options, or push for "Advantage Detailed Targeting."

This blog article from Social Media Examiner does a good job of talking about recent changes to audience targeting.

It's not to say audience research and targeting are going away. There will always be targeting options that can be manipulated within vacation property ad campaigns to squeeze a little extra performance.

3.) Landing Page Optimization Tips

It is important to focus on a high quality landing page when running paid advertisements for vacation properties.

Let's begin by examining the landing pages for your vacation destination to make sure they follow best practices. In this review, we consider the following factors and more:

• Do you have a headline that emphasizes benefits?
• Is there an image above the fold?
• Does the content engage the reader?
• Do I have immediate access to a lead form?
• Are the call to actions easily noticeable?
• How quickly does the page load?
• Does social proof exist?
• Am I able to load the page on a mobile device?

Designing and developing a quality landing page involves so many factors. Here is a great blog post about what makes a quality landing page.

Until you have a landing page that follows best practices, don't spend money on paid ads. Ideally, you should never consider your landing page to be finished. Try running A/B testing every few months to continue refining your sales pitch.

4.) Sales Funnel Tips

Rather than a landing page, you might want to consider building out a sales funnel. To build leads, grow email audiences, and even make online purchases, we rely on sales funnels.

One of our customers promotes an online fitness challenge that you can even join from your home. In the course of managing their digital marketing, we built several sales funnels using Click Funnels. Here are a few of the funnels we used:

• By using squeeze pages, we captured email addresses and raised awareness for the program.
• We used lead magnets to provide people with healthy eating tips, fitness tips, webinars, and sneak peaks in exchange for an email address.
• Through application funnels, we pushed people towards the idea of applying to exclusive programs.
• For the online program, we used sales letter funnels as the registration system.

There are many different types of funnels, so your vacation destination isn't limited to only these options. It is important to remember that these can be very useful for gauging interest in a product or service, building an email subscriber base, and selling a product or service online.

5.) Conversion Rate Optimization Tips

Having a clear understanding of your conversion rate is critical to making informed advertising decisions. The average conversion rate is between 1-3%, but that varies greatly between industries, products, and services.

Here's a basic scenario that illustrates conversion rates' impact.

1. You sell a $100 product or service on your website.
2. You have a 1% conversion rate. This means for every 100 site visitors you sell 1 product or service.
3. The average cost per click (CPC) on your website is $1.00, meaning you spend $1.00 for each person who visits it.
4. You would need to pay $100 for 100 clicks from paid advertising to sell 1 product or service. This is known as your cost per acquisition (CPA).
5. For every dollar you spend on paid advertising, you would receive one dollar back in return (ROAS).

This return on ad spend is likely not acceptable for most vacation destinations, but is often what we see when reviewing new client accounts.

To improve the situation, you hire a PPC advertising company to modify your campaign settings, ad creatives, and landing page experience.

Let's assume those improvements bring your conversion rate up from 1% to 2%. That means for every 100 visits to your website you now sell 2 products. This is twice the return on ad spend! You might be profitable now selling that product or service, if your margins are good.

Understanding your conversion rate, and knowing how to improve it, can be crucial to the management of your paid advertising.

6.) Ad Creation Tips

This is potentially one of the most important aspects of a Facebook Ads account, but it also applies to Google Display Ads.

When you run Facebook Ads or Instagram Ads for vacation properties, you are mostly targeting a cold audience that is more interested in quickly scrolling by advertisements in favor of seeing what their friends and family are up to online.

You should develop an understanding of how to capture someone's attention in a split second.

To do this, you need to build out awesome ad creatives that make someone stop for a second and say to themselves, "wait a second, what...?"

This doesn't happen by running the same ad creative over and over and over again. Even if it is a great ad, it will eventually become stale. You should change things up frequently, even if you are just targeting people nearby.

If you don't change out your ad creatives and test new ideas, you'll suffer from what is called "ad fatigue." This is the state in which your target audience has already seen your ad so many times that they instinctively scroll by it without ever interacting with your brand.

Don't be caught in this situation. You should understand when to pause an ad because it isn't performing as well as it once did. You should understand when to test new ideas, especially if you are emotionally attached to an ad that you spent a lot of time making.

Pricing for Vacation Destination Paid Ads Management

If you want us to dedicate more time to your campaigns, the price of our PPC management packages will be adjusted accordingly. The price for our PPC ads management plans begins at the amount provided in the list below, but we are willing to consider a higher budget if your ad spend or service requirements are greater.

Types of Paid Ads for Vacation Destinations

For vacation destinations, there are many ways to run paid ads. vacation destinations definitely use paid advertising. Let's take a look at some of the most common ones.

1.) Local Business Ads

Local ads for your vacation destination can be run through nearly any advertising platform. One platform may be more effective for your local area vacation destination than another. It is important to try out every available option to see which works best for your needs. Let's talk about a few local advertising choices.

From Google, you'll have two options.

As a first step, you can run traditional Google Adwords, possibly using their newer Performance Max campaign type. With this ad campaign type, the Google algorithm can find the best combination of headlines, images, videos, and service locations to bring you customers. Performance Max campaigns are used frequently by accounting, legal, dental, and medical professionals. Even localized stores use this campaign type.

Google's second option for qualifying businesses is their Local Service Ads. Using Local Service Ads, you get charged a flat fee for each lead the platform generates. Plumbers, electricians, roofers, and heating installers often use Google Local Service Ads.

You can also use Facebook Ads to target people in your local area. The process is a little simpler since it just requires setting up a campaign with ad sets with geographic restrictions to ZIP codes in the target area. For all types of vacation destinations, we often use Facebook Ads.

2.) Social Media Advertising

A social ad is pretty much any online advertisement you see on a social networking site.

Maintaining fresh ad creatives is key to social ads. If you don't rotate out ad creatives every few weeks your campaign performance will slowly decrease. For higher spending ad campaigns, you might need to look at weekly ad creative changes.

One of the best things about social media ads is that you can target audiences who aren't yet aware of your product or service. It's quite the opposite when you run search advertising since you only get to show them when someone searches for what your vacation destination offers.

It can also be a curse, as conversion rates often drop when people aren't closer to making an immediate purchase.

3.) Search Engine Advertising

You'll want to invest in search engine marketing if you know people are looking online for the products you offer.

In some circles, this is referred to as vacation destination Search Engine Marketing, or SEM. An advertisement that appears on the search results page of a search engine is called a search ad, which are above the organic SEO placements.

If you've been running search engine ads on Google for a while and have been successful at it, we suggest considering copying the campaigns over to the Bing Ads platform. In an October 2022 study from StatCounter, Bing was the primary search engine used by approximately 3.57% of online users.

4.) Display Ads

You'll find display ads on all kinds of message boards, chat rooms, game lounges, news websites (sometimes even local news stations), gossip websites, and more.

Google Ads and Bing Ads commonly offer these campaign types.

With display ads, all you need are a few different sizes of ad creatives. It also helps to have a general idea of your target audience, but both ad platforms have their own algorithms that help you produce results from your ad spend.

5.) Retargeting Ads

There is a good chance that not everyone will convert during their first experience with your vacation destination website, landing page, or sales funnel.

To help people return to your website after they've thought through various options, retargeting ads are almost always recommended.

Almost any ad platform can be used for retargeting ads.

6.) Shopping Ads

It was Google Shopping Campaigns that popularized this form of search advertising.

If you want to promote your vacation destination through Google Shopping, you'll need an ecommerce website, a product feed (CSV or TXT), and a Google Merchant Center account.

By using these tools, you can provide Google Ads with accurate product data, including title, SKU, image, price, and availability. From there, they will be able to find the right types of search queries to display your products at the top of the search results page.

7.) Video Ads

Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and other social networking sites allow you to run video ads.

If you are interested in running YouTube Ads, you'll just need to set up a video ads campaign in Google Ads.

It's necessary to have a working Facebook Ads account to run video ads on Facebook or Instagram.

Video is an excellent ad creative in terms of conversion opportunities. We frequently use video ads to showcase product launches, custom services, personal introductions, and more!

If you have the budget to support ad creatives in video format, look to implement them into your paid ads campaigns.