Facebook Ads for Vacation Rentals: Tips to Advertise Your Property

Master Facebook Ads for vacation rentals. Learn tips to advertise your property effectively and boost bookings in the competitive vacation rental market.

As a book direct host, if you want to compete with giants like Airbnb, you must focus on Facebook ads for vacation rentals. With almost 4 billion users, Facebook is on top of social media platforms for business advertising.

It allows you to target specific niches based on interests, demographics, and behaviors. So, instead of relying on large OTAs to do the marketing for you, you take matters into your own hands and reach audiences you wouldn't otherwise.

However, Facebook advertising can be chaotic. With so many targeting options, even pro marketers find it overwhelming. And since you already have a lot on your plate as a property owner, we're here to shed some light on Facebook ads for vacation rentals.

Why Should You Use Facebook Ads for Vacation Rentals

Apart from creating an online community with active followers around your brand, Facebook advertising allows you to:

• Increase brand awareness. Get in front of potential guests when they're ready to book or reach individuals who haven't started planning their trip yet. Generate visibility for your brand online without waiting to get discovered over time.
• Drive more bookings. Guide Facebook users to your book-direct website through appealing visuals and compelling calls to action. Secure bookings and increase profits with well-designed ads.
• Reach specific niches. If your vacation rental business specializes in audiences such as pet-friendly, couples, families, or LGBTQ+, use Facebook ads to target them. Find your "tribe of guests" online without passively waiting for generic audiences to book.
• Grow your business with an affordable investment. Facebook ads are budget-friendly with no strings attached. You can start advertising for as little as $5 and run ads as long as you can afford them.

Vacation rental marketing: tips for vacation rental owners

Types of Facebook Ads for Vacation Rentals

What we love about Facebook ads for vacation rentals is the endless targeting options.

Unlike Google Ads, where you mainly target audiences with keywords, Facebook allows you to reach different people based on goals, creatives, and placement. Here are the most common ad types within each category.

Goals

• Awareness: reach the largest number of users when your business is brand new.
• Traffic: Send people to your website to secure more bookings.
• Engagement: Encourage guests to interact with your business online.
• Leads: Reach users willing to share their information with your business, such as their email or phone number.
• App Promotion: Get mobile users to download or purchase products within your app.
• Sales: Find people likely to book your vacation rental property.

Advertise your vacation rental listing with Facebook ads

Placement

Decide where your ads will show on Meta. Facebook gives you automatic, predefined placements to make it easier. The most usual placements are:

• Feeds
• Stories and Reels
• Search
• Messages
• In-Article
• In-Stream
• Apps and Sites

Creative

Here are the most common types of Facebook ad creatives:

• Single image or video ads: It also comes as a slideshow with multiple images.
• Carousel ads: Two or more scrollable images or videos.
• Collection: A group of items that opens into a fullscreen mobile experience.

Facebook ads for vacation rentals to increase direct bookings

Facebook Ads for Vacation Rentals Examples

The most crucial aspect of Facebook ads for vacation rentals is targeting. Here are some Facebook audience ideas you can target as a vacation rental owner:

1. Interest-based Audiences

You'll need to be familiar with your buyer persona for this campaign type. Start by specifying their gender, age, location, income, fears, and goals. For example, your buyer persona might be a 30-year-old female solo traveler from Portugal interested in adventure and safety while traveling.

Then, use that information to create your Facebook audiences. The platform allows you to specify your audience to the T, so targeting specific niches will be a piece of cake.

2. Social Media Visitors

If you maintain an online presence through Instagram and Facebook, you probably already have a loyal follower base. These are people interested in your vacation rentals who will likely book anytime soon.

With Facebook ads, you can target solely your social media followers to persuade them to purchase, or you can promote ads to users who visited your pages but never followed you. This is a prime opportunity to grow your follower count and reappear in front of leads who need a little push.

Facebook ads for the vacation rental industry

3. Lookalike Audiences

Through Facebook's intelligent lookalike targeting, you can target guests with similar interests to those who already interacted with your business. For example, you can create a lookalike audience for your social media visitors within a few clicks.

It'll be like telling Facebook, "These people visited my social media pages, and I need you to find similar ones to interact with my business". This increases your chances of finding more leads and generating sales.

4. Retargeting Campaigns for Website Visitors

If you're marketing vacation rentals with a book-direct website, you're already attracting visitors through various online sources. Facebook allows you to retarget those audiences by showing them ads related to your business.

In other words, if someone visited your website but took no action, you can appear in their social media feed with retargeting ads and persuade them to book. Most people don't convert the first time and need a little reminder. We bet you'll be surprised by the results of this campaign.

Invest in Facebook ads for your vacation rental marketing plan

5. Retargeting Campaigns for Past Guests Via Email

If you're collecting past guests' emails as part of your vacation rental marketing strategy, this next campaign type will be your goldmine for attracting similar leads.

Facebook allows you to upload your email lists into the Ad Manager and either retarget past guests or target lookalike audiences based on them. This is an excellent idea for generating returning customers to your vacation rental businesses and creating a loyal fanbase around your brand.

If you target lookalike audiences based on past guests, you'll first need to introduce your properties with several posts before earning their trust and conversions.

Facebook ads for vacation rental software

Your Turn to Run Facebook Ads for Vacation Rentals

To sum up, Facebook ads for vacation rentals are powerful tools in your marketing quiver. While they do require some initial investment, you can generate double the results in no time.

If you want to boost the marketing efforts of your property management company, we recommend building your own book-direct website. Make it easy for potential guests to book with you and get full control of your calendar.

At Houfy, we can help you create your website without the OTAs fees. You only pay a one-time $5.99 host verification fee and get to upload unlimited listings. Join a community of over 15,000 hosts today!