Facebook Ads for STR's

[Christina Hennessy]

Had anyone had Success with running ads on Facebook for bookings on your STR? If yes, would you mind sharing your strategy and/or advice?

[Ken Boone]

Bill Faeth has like a 3 hour training class on how to run FB ads for STRs. I took that last year which honestly saved me a lot of time in figuring out how to do it right.  The hard part is tracking how effective the ads are. 

Now at the end of the stay we send our guests a link to a google survey I built just to get some more feedback from guests. Most guests do not touch this survey - only a very very small percentage. As in, I have 4 STRs and they have all been booked solid for the last 2 months and I haven't had a response to this survey in over 6 weeks. Now having said that, I do have a question on there how did you hear about us? One of the answers is Facebook Ads.

I received a handful of replies with Facebook Ads selected on that survey. Based on the low number of people that actually responded to that survey, I feel like I most likely had several more bookings than what came back in the survey as a result of the FB ads.

The other thing the Ads do is help you grow your facebook followers. One thing I have learned over the years, social media is a numbers game, the more followers you have, the more people see what you post, the higher odds someone will act. So last year my focus was on learning how to run FB ads, this year my focus is on growing my FB following.

I am no expert at this but here are a few pointers that I have picked up on.

- Video Ads do better than photo ads.
- You need to capture their attention within the first 2 seconds
- You need to use selective targeting so you are hitting the right guest avatar.
- If an ad is not running under .18 - .20 a click, don't be afraid to stop the ad and try something different.