Facebook Launches "Trip Consideration"

It takes an average of 43 days before the idea of travelling becomes a decision as to where to go. This was what Facebook Head of Travel, Christine Warner said based on the social network's research. Now, this period may shorten with Facebook's launch of its new ad product "Trip Consideration." The feature is currently available via Facebook, Instagram and Audience Network, and through Facebook marketing partners including Adphorus, Koddi, MakeMeReach, Smartly.io and StitcherAds. According to Facebook, the feature may not be available to everyone right now but will be gradually rolled out to accounts.

Trip Consideration targets users who have the intent to travel before they have even started planning their trips. With the new product, different from Dynamic Ads for Travel which retargets site visitors, travel advertisers will not have to wait until vacationers have decided as to where to go. Facebook is aware that travel discovery and trip planning is already happening across their platforms - 68% of millennials on Facebook found their recent trip ideas from Facebook. The figure is 60% of millennials on Instagram. The social media giant sees this as a huge opportunity for travel advertisers to reach people who are yet finding inspiration online for their next travel destination and woo them early on in their travel journey as they search for inspiration for their next trip. With Travel Consideration, advertisers can now deliver ads to promote flight or hotel deals to inspire vacationers to push for a decision and make a booking.

When making Optimization for Delivery choice for an ad set, you choose how you want your ads to be delivered to your audience based on your goal. Upon activating the trip consideration feature, prioritise people who show an intent to travel but haven't expressed intent on a specific destination. Chances are they have browsed travel sites but have only landed on the homepages of those sites. With Trip Considerations, it is easy for advertisers to deliver the messages to the right person, at the right time since they can select the creative they want without the need for a catalogue. The feature works with other targeting features.

To set up, Facebook pixel must have been implemented to take advantage of the targeting feature. The Trip Conversion sits as an optimisation option under the Conversions campaign objective. Facebook recommends that the audience size be as much as 7 million to maximise reach and ad performance and focus optimisation on events for search, initiate checkout or purchases.

With Trip Considerations, advertisers can choose specific images to be shown in the ad in creative formats (currently limited to static images, carousels, collections or just a single video.)