Meta Ads - How to achieve your marketing goals in tourism with Facebook and Instagram
![[Translate to English:]](/fileadmin/_processed_/b/c/csm_004_2025_Facebook_Instagram_b1e0ee4e54.png "[Translate to English:]")
In today's digital world, it's crucial to use the right marketing strategies to successfully market your tourism business.
Meta, the company behind Facebook and Instagram, is one of the most powerful platforms for paid advertising. With billions of users worldwide, Facebook and Instagram are particularly important for tourism businesses to run targeted campaigns and reach potential customers at every stage of the customer journey. In this blog article, we give you an overview of the possibilities with the Ads Manager to maximize your online presence and sustainably strengthen your tourism business.
Instagram - the platform for visual advertising
Instagram has 450 million monthly active users in Europe and is particularly popular with young adults. As an image and video-focused platform, Instagram is ideal for appealing, visual campaigns. Instagram Stories and Reels in particular offer high reach and interaction rates as ad formats. Advertising on Instagram is often complemented by appealing images, videos and carousel ads that make it easy for users to fall in love with your brand or product. Especially in the tourism sector, wonderful experiences (and vouchers for them as well?) can be presented in the best possible way.
Facebook - Broad user base and andvanced targeting
Despite slightly declining user numbers, Facebook remains one of the most important platforms in digital marketing. With 23 million active daily users in Germany alone, Facebook continues to achieve an enormous reach, especially among older target groups. People aged 30 to 65 in particular use the platform intensively, making it an ideal place for targeted advertising campaigns.
Tourism companies can present their offers here in a variety of ways: Ads appear in the classic newsfeed, in the right-hand column or, increasingly, in Facebook Stories & Reels. The opportunity to integrate advertising messages in a visually appealing way and directly into users' everyday lives increases the chances of engagement and conversions.
Ads Manager
The Ads Manager can be accessed via the Meta Business Suite, for example, and is the central tool for managing your campaigns on Facebook and Instagram. It offers many options in terms of campaign creation, target group targeting and tracking. In addition, there are detailed insights into the performance of your ads and many tools to precisely control and optimize your campaigns.
When setting up a campaign, you are initially faced with the question of what goal you are pursuing. There is a selection for each phase of the customer journey.
The most important ones are
- Awareness: Ideal for raising awareness of new destinations or special hotel offers.
- Traffic: Aim to bring more visitors to your website, e.g. for bookings or voucher sales.
- Interactions: Encourage your target audience to interact with your ads to increase their reach and engagement.
- Leads: Use lead forms to collect contact details from potential customers, e.g. for travel inquiries.
- Sales: Optimize your ads directly for sales, e.g. of event tickets or spa vouchers.
When the campaign is running, Meta offers you a whole range of key figures and results.
To help you keep an overview, here are a few of the most important key figures:
- Impressions: How often your ad was shown.
- Reach: How many people have seen your ad.
- Click-through rate (CTR): Percentage of people who clicked on your ad.
- Cost per click (CPC): Average cost of a click on your ad.
- Frequency: The average number of times accounts have seen your ad.
- Conversions: How many people took the desired action, e.g. made a booking or purchased a voucher.
- Return on Ad Spend (ROAS): Shows you how much revenue you generate per euro invested.
Placements in the metaverse
Meta offers a variety of platforms on which you can place your ads, including Facebook, Instagram and Messenger. In addition to these platforms, the Audience Network also allows you to place ads on partner websites and mobile apps, extending your reach beyond the boundaries of the meta platforms. This variety of platforms ensures that you can reach different users on different channels and in different usage contexts.
Here are the most important placements for your Meta Ads:
- Instagram Feed
- Instagram Stories
- Instagram Explore
- Facebook Newsfeed
- Facebook Right Column
- Facebook Marketplace
- Facebook Stories
- Messenger Ads
- Audience Network
Your personal upgrade
Not sure if your campaigns are fit for your store? Book your individual workshop (€ 560 incl. preparation and follow-up) with our online marketing team now. In 2 hours of exclusive exchange of experience, we will tailor everything perfectly to your business.
Target audiences - How to reach your potential guests
The success of your Meta Ads depends heavily on the right target audience. With the help of custom audiences, for example, you can target users who have already interacted with your brand, be it through website visits, past bookings or existing Instagram followers.
Some application examples:
- Website Custom Audience: Use your website traffic to retarget people who were interested in a specific voucher offer, for example, but have not yet made a purchase.
- Customer File: Upload existing customer data to provide them with specific offers, such as special promotions for regular guests.
Lookalike audiences allow you to reach new users who have similar characteristics to your existing customers. This allows you to find potential guests who are most likely to be interested in your offer.
Conversion API and Meta Pixel - The key to precise measurement
To create custom audiences and target people who have already interacted with your website, you will need the meta pixel in most cases. This small code snippet is installed on your website and records important visitor actions, such as page views or purchases. The pixel plays a central role as it transmits the collected data directly to Meta. In this way, this data can be used for targeted advertising campaigns and the creation of audiences to address the right users at the right time.
In addition to the Meta Pixel function, the Conversion API is a crucial tool. This API works in the background and sends data directly from your server to Meta, regardless of whether a user accepts cookies or not. Especially in times of increasing data protection measures, such as those introduced by the iOS updates, the Conversion API is becoming increasingly important. It ensures that you receive comprehensive and precise data even without cookie-based tracking, which significantly improves the accuracy of your campaign analysis.
The combination of Meta Pixel and Conversion API gives you a complete picture of the behavior of your website visitors. The pixel records the behavior of users on the website, while the Conversion API ensures that server data such as purchases or registrations are also tracked. This comprehensive data collection allows you to optimize your campaigns in real time, improve targeting and ultimately increase the success of your ads.
You can find tips on implementing tracking in your incert system here.
You need more information?
Crisp 6 minutes of input from our online marketing experts Raphael & Nadine - everything you need to know about eMarketing campaigns from incert.
Conclusion
Meta Ads on Facebook and Instagram offer tourism companies a first-class opportunity to address their target groups precisely and achieve their marketing goals efficiently. Through targeted campaigns, precise tracking and the right approach, companies can not only generate more bookings and higher sales, but also increase their brand awareness.
To ensure the success of such campaigns, it is crucial to know your target group precisely and minimize wastage. A central element for precise target group creation is the creation of a pixel. For example, re-marketing campaigns can be set up and meaningful look-alike target groups can be created.
The Meta Pixel in combination with the Conversion API enables tracking not only to collect valuable data, but also to optimize campaigns based on concrete results. This makes the return on ad spend (ROAS) transparent, which is crucial for the long-term success of meta campaigns.
Contact us
If you're ready to take your online marketing to the next level or need more information, don't hesitate to contact us at emarketing(at)incert.at. We look forward to hearing from you!