The majority of travelers do not book an hotel during their first visit to the website. The majority of travelers don’t book a hotel on their first visit to a website. Instead, they browse through tabs and compare prices, then disappear. You risk losing your customers if you don’t stay in their minds. online travel agencies (OTAs or competitors)
Retargeting ads are a key part of the digital strategy for hotels. They help to reengage travelers with high intent who have shown interest in your hotel. This allows teams to recover revenue from abandoned carts and increase direct bookings.
In this article we will explore the retargeting ad’s working, why they are an essential part of a digital strategy for your property, and how to create successful campaigns which maximize revenue.
What is retargeting?
97% of visitors never return To complete their purchase after leaving a website. Retargeting advertisements help to achieve this by nurturing previous engaged travelers that have interacted on your website but not completed a booking. This ad uses cookies to track visitors and then target them. It ensures that your brand is always top of mind, even if they have left your website.
Retargeting shows personalized ads on a variety of platforms, such as Google’s Ad Network and thousands partner websites. This helps to remind visitors of your property. It also encourages them back.
Retargeting ads are primarily designed to increase visibility and page views. It is different from paid advertising such as:
- Metasearch Ads: You can compete with online travel agents (OTAs) to get the top ranking on metasearch sites, such as KAYAK or Google Hotel Ads
- Keyword Ads Find new guests by using search engines.
Retargeting vs. remarketing
Retargeting and remarketing are often confused, but they serve different purposes.
Retargeting Refers to the placement of ads and display advertisements shown to website visitors who visited your site but did not make a purchase.
Remarketing Re-engage past guests with email, social networks, and other promotional activities.
Remarketing keeps your brand in the public eye while retargeting encourages repeat visitors. Both approaches work together to create a balanced strategy for hoteliers.
The core elements of a retargeting campaign
Retargeting ads can be relatively easy to create compared with other digital advertising formats. They typically consist of just an image, a headline, and a short block of text—but their power lies in strategic execution, not complexity.
Retargeting ads that are successful are persuasive, engaging and encourage action. This retargeting ad will pique the interest of your potential guests and give them a reason to visit your website and make a booking. This is done through four key elements:
- Strong visualsHigh-quality photos that capture the ambience and amenities of your property.
- Compelling copy: Persuasive messages that promote direct booking and reinforce the value of your property.
- Optimized call-to-action (CTA): Use action-oriented phrases such as “Book Now”, “Limited Time Offer” and “Limited Stock.”
- Mobile optimized format Visually effective, responsive, easy to use, and compatible with all screen sizes and devices.
Hotel retargeting: Benefits
Retargeting ads can be a great addition to your hotel marketing strategy. Retargeting advertisements help revenue managers and marketing create a more balanced revenue strategy. hotel distribution strategy To attract the right audience to their property on the correct channel at the appropriate time.
Remarketing Ads:
Drive direct bookings
You can also find out more about us on our website. 2025 State of Independent Lodging Report Online travel agencies are responsible for 61% of all bookings, an increase of 1.2% YOY. Although OTAs are a key part of a hotel’s distribution and marketing strategy, they should not be the main source of bookings.
Retargeting ads help hotels recover a portion of their share by providing constant follow-ups to high-intent users and recovering revenue lost during the booking procedure. Instead of paying OTAs commissions, hotels could redirect this budget towards their own digital marketing strategy.
Brand recognition is important.
When marketing your hotel, it is equally important to consider brand recognition. Retargeting ads help to strengthen your brand by keeping you at the top of travelers’ minds.
Cost-effective
Retargeting is a great way to boost conversions. Retargeting ads are more likely to be effective than cold leads because they target warm leads and remind them of the amenities, room types, and features you offer.
Support for broader marketing efficiency
Retargeting doesn’t just stand on its own—it amplifies the effectiveness of your other marketing efforts. It captures the value of traffic from SEO, metasearch. social mediaThis gives undecided website visitors a second opportunity to convert. This increases the ROI for all of your channels.
Get strategic insights
Retargeting campaigns can also provide valuable insights. From email subject lines and on-site banners to paid search campaigns and website banners, the best-performing visuals can help inform your marketing strategy.
Retargeting: How to make it effective
Retargeting is a complex process that requires careful planning and execution. Focus on creative ads, bidding strategies, guest segmentation and constant optimization to maximize your campaigns. The following are key steps in running an effective retargeting for your hotel.
1. Choose the right travelers
To launch a successful campaign, it is important to understand how the targeting process works.
When a traveler visits your hotel website or booking engine, a small piece of code—often referred to as a tracking pixel or retargeting script—places a cookie in their browser. Your ad platform can anonymously track the visitor, and then display your ads across a variety of partner websites. These ads will follow travelers throughout their entire research process, helping to keep your property top of mind until they are ready to book.
You can use this data to tailor your retargeting campaigns so that they match the intent of guests. For instance, you may serve different messages for guests searching for weekend getaways as opposed to longer stays or mobile users compared with desktop browsers.
2. Ad creatives optimized
Optimising your creative will ensure that your campaigns are effective and successful. Test your promotional messages versus brand messaging. To create a seamless booking experience, match your ad images with your booking engine.
Be creative, but remember that viewers of your retargeting advertisement will have previously visited your site.
3. Adopt a bid strategy that is strategic
Bidding plays a critical role in determining how often—and where—your retargeting ads appear online. Retargeting campaigns usually operate using a real-time bid model. Your ad platform will compete in auctions for the right to show your ads. You can set your bids based on impressions and clicks.
Platforms like Google automatically enter your ads into auctions, and your bid amount, ad quality, and relevance score determine whether—and how frequently—your ad is shown. Even small changes to your bidding strategy will have a significant impact on the performance of your campaign.
Avoid making changes to your strategy for retargeting that are only temporary. Give your campaign three months at least to collect meaningful data.
4. Bookings should be seamless
Retargeting campaigns that are well-executed can fail if the booking process is slow or confusing. You should ensure that your booking engine is user-friendlyFast and in line with your brand’s identity to maximize conversions.
5. Test results and analyse them
Measure the performance of your retargeting ads after you launch them to find out which parts could be optimized for better results.
Retargeting ads are measured primarily by impressions because many ad viewers return to your site in other ways. You can also measure:
- Click-through Rate (CTR) CTR is 10x higher on retargeting ads If CTR is low, test new images, messaging and CTA wording. Test new images, messages, and CTA words if CTR is low.
- Conversion Rate: Booking engine experiences can be improved if you are experiencing low conversions.
- Return on advertising spend (ROAS). If ROAS performance is not as expected, you may need to adjust your budget or refine your audience targeting.
You can refine your strategy by constantly monitoring and adjusting retargeting campaigns.
Cloudbeds: Digital marketing for hotels with retargeting.
Easy-to-use retargeting advertising campaigns for high-ROI Cloudbeds Digital Marketing. The solution simplifies retargeting ads with AI-enhanced ad campaigns, budget control and real-time tracking of performance, all from within your PMS.
Cloudbeds Offers:
AI capabilities
Cloudbeds’ retargeting features are integrated directly into the platform. This makes it easy to manage all of your ads in one place. AI-enabled ad campaigns help you automatically generate and adapt your property images and messages across your retargeting advertisements.
Google Ad Network Placements
Cloudbeds’ Digital Marketing allows placements on Google’s advertising network, which includes premium sites like The New York Times and Weather.com. The ads will also appear on more niche websites and those specific to a particular country.
This solution automatically optimizes your ads to match your best performing ads and uses dynamically generated display ads by Google.
Performance tracking and Optimization
Cloudbeds provides a dashboard that allows you to track and optimize important metrics, such as clicks, conversions and ROAS. You can attribute bookings accurately to retargeting campaigns with tracking scripts. This allows you to optimize your future advertising strategies based on data.
Advertisers have the ability to set and adjust their budgets, while tracking revenue generated in real-time. This provides greater insight and optimization abilities for maximum campaign effectiveness.
Reengage customers and boost direct bookings
Hotels can use retargeting ads to engage travelers with high intent and encourage direct bookings. You can convert abandoned bookings to confirmed ones by targeting past visitors using compelling visuals, persuasive messages, and strategically placed CTAs.
Cloudbeds
Cloudbeds is a leading platform that redefines the concept of a PMS in the hospitality industry. It serves more than tens thousands of properties worldwide, across 150 countries. Built from the ground up to be masterfully unified and scalable, the award-winning Cloudbeds Platform brings together built-in and integrated solutions that modernize hotel operations & finance, distribution & marketing, guest experience, and revenue & analytics. Cloudbeds was founded in 2012. It has won numerous awards, including the World Travel Awards’ World’s Best Hotel PMS Solutions Provider in 2022, as well as recognition in Deloitte Technology Fast 500 for 2024.
