How Retargeting Ads Bring Tour Guests Back to Book

You’re already getting traffic to your website. The problem is most of those visitors leave and never come back.

In this episode, we break down how retargeting ads help tour operators stay in front of those potential guests and turn missed opportunities into actual bookings. Most people do not book on their first visit, and without a follow up system, they are gone. 

You’ll learn:

• What remarketing ads are and how they work
• Who you should be retargeting first 
• What to say in your ads to drive bookings 

🚀 Take the Growth Engine Assessment to find out where you might need to improve:
https://www.resmarksystems.com/growth-engine-survey

📲 Follow Us on Social Media
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ResmarkSystems
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/resmarkllc
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@RESMARKSystems
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/resmark-systems

📈 Want Help Growing Your Tour Business?
Visit https://www.resmarkweb.com
Book a call: https://www.resmarkweb.com/request-quote
Call or text us directly: 385-449-4079
Email Nikki: nikki@resmarksystems.com

0:00 You’re Losing Bookings After Visitors Leave Your Website
2:11 Why Big Companies Win With Retargeting Ads
4:32 What Remarketing Ads Actually Do
5:19 How to Set Up Meta Pixel and Google Tag
7:43 The Best Audiences to Retarget First
9:49 How to Bring Visitors Back to Book
11:52 Why Retargeting Works Over Time
13:41 What to Say in Your Retargeting Ads
15:43 Using Reviews and Testimonials to Convert
18:45 Keep Your Retargeting Ads Simple
20:14 How to Segment Your Audiences
22:11 Why Retargeting Has Lower Costs and Higher ROI
24:41 Retargeting Budget Tips for Tour Operators
25:17 How Retargeting Fits Into Your Marketing System

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

All right, you made it to episode 14 of the Tor Operator Growth Podcast. And today we're talking about something I'm really passionate about, and that's remarketing. Now, most tour operators we talk to are already investing in marketing, whether that's Google ads, social media, SEO, maybe even OTAs, and they're doing a lot to get people to their website. But here's the problem once somebody leaves that site, that's it. There's no follow-up, there's no second touch point, there's no system to bring them back. And a lot of times you didn't even capture their contact information. However, after listening to our previous episodes, hopefully you're at least trying to get that information. So they visited your website, they showed interest, and now they're gone. This is where remarketing comes into play because with something as simple as having your tracking setup, which we'll talk about, your Metapixel, your Google Tag, you can stay in front of people who have already visited your website, people who already know who you are, people who were maybe close to booking. Um, and instead of losing them, you're just showing up in front of them over and over again. We see this all the time. Really solid tour operators have great experiences, strong businesses, and they're missing something that is this simple. And maybe they're even running Facebook ads, but they're not running free marketing ads. They have, they don't have any in place. So, which means they are constantly paying for new traffic instead of converting the traffic that they already have. And this is still sitting in the planning stage of the Rosemark Growth Engine because they found you, they've checked you out, they're interested, but they have not booked just yet. This is your chance to get in front of them. So great. You explained this pretty well, and you've said this a few times on um the calls. Have you or on the podcast? Have you ever noticed when you were on a tour operator's website and then um you came off their website and then you start seeing them on Facebook as you're casually nonchalantly scrolling? Um, do you see that tour operators do this pretty well?

SPEAKER_00 2:11

So I, if we go back to, I don't remember if we talked about this on the podcast or if it was just a webinar, but me and my wife were planning a trip to go to Greece. We've put that off for now just because of costs of airfare and stuff right now. But we're actually, we just went on a trip to San Diego. And as we were researching that trip, I actually got a ton of remarketing ads. So usually I don't see any. But this time around, I did. And so I started thinking, like, why am I seeing these, right? And the people that were sending them to me were businesses like SeaWorld, Legoland, Disneyland, all these big companies, right? But when I go to small tour operators or just normal tour operators, not these big behemoth of like adventure parks and stuff, I'm not getting that nearly as much. There's rarely do I see remarketing from different tour operators. And I go to a lot of websites, whether they're current clients or previous clients or potential clients. Like I'm going and searching for inspiration. So I'm on sites all the time, clicking around. Um, most of the time I'm accepting the cookies because I want to see if they're gonna remarket to me. If I don't accept the cookies, the chance of remarketing is like zero. Um, but I don't see a lot from these from most tour operators. And so I started thinking, why are these big businesses doing it, but not these others that maybe aren't generating hundreds of millions of dollars a year? And it started making me think, is it a misunderstanding of how remarketing ads work? Is it a time constraint? Is it budget? They just people aren't don't feel like they have the budget for remarketing. But when we we've talked about this multiple times, that 98% of website visitors don't convert the first time. And so remarketing ads can really help you stay top of mind and help bring people down that funnel to the booking, right? And so these big companies are doing it. You can too, no matter what size you are, it's just making sure that you're doing it right, which we'll talk about. So, what I want you to understand, if you get one thing out of this, like you don't have to remarket to everyone who lands on your website. You can target them based on specific criteria. So that's where you'll just waste a lot of money, is if someone lands on your homepage and you are spending money on retargeting all of them. Because if your website's like any other website I've ever looked at, there's a lot of traffic that is coming to your website and bouncing pretty quick because maybe they didn't mean to click on it. Maybe they came through a keyword that's not as targeted to what they were looking for and it came to your website. So making sure that you're targeting just the people that you want to is huge. And that's where you're gonna be able to save a bunch of money is by being specific in that criteria. So, Nikki, can you walk us through like what remarketing is and how it works?

SPEAKER_01 5:19

Yeah, absolutely. Remarketing is just showing ads to people who have already interacted with your business. That's it. Now, how this actually works at a high-level standpoint is you install the tracking on your website. So this is where things like your uh Metapixel, uh, what people call your Facebook Pixel and your Google Tag come into play. And just to simplify that, your Google tag is basically the same idea. It's a small piece of code you put on your website that tracks what people are actually doing. So whether somebody maybe visits a page, goes to check your availability, or actually starts a booking, um, that data is being tracked as long as cookies are enabled. And then you can use that data to build audiences based on behavior. So people who have visited your website, people who have looked at a specific tour, um and people who have started booking but didn't finish, that's how these platforms know who to show your ads to. These tracking codes do all the work. So it is not that complex, but that's basically remarketing in a nutshell. If you do not have tracking in place, you cannot do remarketing. It's period. So that's where I see a lot of these gaps. I'll go to a tour operator's website and I'll go to check if their tracking codes are installed. And I would say if I had to throw out a stat, 80% of the time it's not. Even for some of the bigger tour operators who I think maybe they have an in-house marketing team and they're doing these things, they don't have it installed. I have a Chrome extension on my computer where I could check to see if you have it. And if you want to know, if you have it, drop a comment or shoot me an email or text message. I'll let you know if you have that installed. But if you get anything out of this episode, it is get that installed because if you don't have that installed, you're not going to be able to retarget to um those specific audiences. And even if you're not running Facebook ads or you don't have a plan to in the near future, you want to get these tracking codes installed so that you can start building that audience. So when you are ready to run Facebook ads, you have that data and you're not starting from zero. So we always make sure to set this up, even if we're not running Facebook ads for a tour operator, because it's a really simple win. All right. So with that in mind, let's talk about who we should actually be remarketing to. Great. What are the key audiences Tor operators should be thinking about here?

SPEAKER_00 7:52

Like I mentioned before, just to reiterate this, don't worry about everyone, right? So create these audiences. And who are those audiences? So you can basically create audiences around whatever specific criteria you want. So if someone goes to a specific URL, you can now retarget them with specific ads, right? So the best way to do this, if you want to start out and save money, focus on those people that are going to be the highest intent to purchase, right? Those people probably aren't the ones that came to your homepage and left. They're probably not the ones that came to, you know, like your category page and left. They're the people that have hit multiple of the pages that most people hit in the booking cycle, right? So you can go into Google Analytics and you can look at your funnel and see what pages are people going to through their cycle before they purchase, right? And if you want to save the most money, what's the page that they most people go to right before they book? Typically, it's probably gonna be the tour page where most of the information is about the tour and they're really flushing out those fine details before they hit that book nod button to go and book. And so if you set up an audience of people that have visited that URL, then now it's only gonna target people that make it that far in your website. And so now those are all people that are at least interested in that trip. And what it also does is it helps your ads be way more targeted because now it's a a finer audience. So you can actually post specifically about that trip versus everything you offer or everything that's available in that area that you operate. And so it's gonna be way more targeted. It's gonna help them want to book more because they feel like, hey, they they know what I want here, right? And so making sure that you're engaging with them as they go through that process is gonna be huge. Uh about 72% of people that land on your website, they abandon before booking. So that's a ton of different reasons, but retargeting is one of the best ways to recover those people, right? Because we have that data of where they have been. We don't have their contact information necessarily, but we do have their cookie, their pixel, their that information that we can now retarget them to potentially get them as a lead and put them in our lead nurturing flow, or just you know, keep encouraging them to book. One of the things I saw a lot the last few weeks before our trip was SeaWorld like kept targeting me with these prices aren't gonna last much longer because summer's coming, prices are gonna go up. They were trying to create that scarcity, that urgency to book now because they might not be the same price next week. They're not saying like, hey, prices change on May 5th. They're just saying they might not last long. I don't know if that's May 5th or April 1st or whenever. So I now you know have that urgency to decide a lot quicker on what I'm gonna do and if I'm gonna purchase from them or not. So as you're going through this, you know, remember that retargeted users engage more and they convert at higher rates than a lot of other instances, like a you know, social media campaign that's more for brand awareness. These are people that came to your site, they're ready to learn more. And so setting that up is is super vital. So as you work on setting that up, Nikki's gonna kind of walk us through like why remarketing works and why you should be doing it, really.

SPEAKER_01 11:52

A lot of times if people are on their phone, you know, maybe they're laying in bed scrolling, they're not thinking, they're maybe not in buying mode, but then they see your ad pop up. And now you're creating some form of awareness and you they see it multiple times. And when you're running remarketing ads, you could have frequency caps on them so that maybe that visitor that landed on your website only sees your ad three times in one week or whatnot. You could be very intentional about staying top of mind. So again, maybe they saw your website. Now they see your ad as they're scrolling through social media, but then they got an email from you. All of these touch points really start stacking up, and that is what's going to allow somebody to move towards a booking. Now, this is also weird, I think I want to mention expectations. We need our expectations to shift just a little bit because remarketing is not the same as Google Ads PPC, right? Remarketing is really not going to always capture immediate buying buying intent. And that's because, like I said, somebody might be in bed, scrolling on their phone on social media, and then your ad pops up. You're influencing the decision over time. So with that in mind, Greg, when you are running these ads or when people are running these ads, what should we actually be saying? Because this is a warm audience. This is not a cold audience. So it's people who have probably already seen the offer that you have on the website, or, you know, they already understand your brand a little bit. We're not just introducing ourselves, we're moving them closer to that booking. So, how should tour operators be thinking about the messaging in their remarketing ads?

SPEAKER_00 13:40

I think a common mistake is really mixing up like what social media ads are and remarketing ads are. They're both on social media. But when I say social media, I'm just saying like the random ads for that you're not random, but you're putting them out there without that intent behind it, right? So those are going to be more inspirational. They're going to be more brand awareness, they're going to be more like, hey, this is, you know, a great opportunity to come and have fun with us. But the goal isn't always in those type of ads to send them down the booking funnel immediately. It's really just to get them to click, lead out, uh, fill out a lead form or visit your website and get some information. Whereas remarketing ads, you got them on your website. And now especially if you get really targeted, like we talked about before, their intent to purchase is way higher than someone just scrolling through Facebook, seeing a re an ad out of the out of the blue, right? When I'm when I was researching what to do in San Diego and I'd gone to Seaworld's website, and then the next day I'm on social media scrolling through and I see their ad, like it's not coming out of the blue. I'm like, oh yeah, I was clicking there. And like I mentioned, theirs was all about that urgency. And so it actually made me click again, which maybe cost some money for no reason because I ended up not booking, but it made me click to be like, okay, maybe they have like a better deal than what I saw the other day, right? Um, because of the way it was phrased, made me think there's some sort of discount. I can maybe afford it. I have a lot of kids, it's like expensive to go to, so we didn't know how much we wanted to spend. But now it got me interested again, got me researching it a little bit more, thinking, maybe we should do this. You know, we're gonna be there already. It'll be fun. Whereas if they didn't remark it to me, I would have just forgotten about them and kept moving on, right?

SPEAKER_01 15:41

Um so they got you talking about them, right? So they're in maybe you were never thinking about C roll for the last five years, and maybe you go on another trip where there's another C roll, and then you're thinking, oh yeah, maybe I do go there. Like it gets you, you know, yeah thinking of them.

SPEAKER_00 15:58

For sure. Um, other things to to kind of focus on in remarketing is reassurance. So making sure that they feel like this is right for them. Um, you obviously need to understand the type of person that's gonna come on your trip and that's excited about your trip in order to answer those type of questions. And then you need to let them know what to expect, right? How you do that can be different. It could be through a nice video, maybe just a picture with some text. Whatever that text is, though, should should really reinforce like what they're gonna expect, how much fun they're gonna have, or how you know intense it might be because maybe they like that um intensity as well. Um, you want to handle their objections. This is a great place to do that. They didn't book yet, and that might be for various reasons. One of them might be, well, I don't know, I'm a little worried that this is gonna be a little bit unsafe, or I'm I'm scared, or where am I gonna go to the bathroom in the middle of the Grand Canyon, right? And so answering those type of things in these retargeting ads is just gonna help them feel more comfortable um working with you. And then another one that's always great to include in all of your marketing is social proof. Let your guests speak for you because that's gonna touch people better than your business, right? Seeing a real guest that had just a great time on a trip and maybe talked about some of the objections. Like maybe they were, you know, I was scared to death before going on this, but I don't know why, because it's the best trip in my life. Like that's gonna sell someone way quicker than you standing next to something saying, this is a safe trip and you're gonna have fun, right? So letting that social proof really sell is gonna be super valuable.

SPEAKER_01 17:56

Before you move on from social proof, another um uh ad campaign that I see running really successfully on reach marketing ads is when you they've been on your website and you want to address some of those concerns through a testimonial video, and then you can allow it so that Facebook knows to then only show the next ad to people who have watched maybe 15 seconds of that video. Actually, it would be a lot quicker, probably five seconds of the video. So now they're going, you could have an ad campaign that's more of a funnel. So we're funneling down people to more of a direct offer rather than, you know, just uh a testimonial and expecting them to convert from that. Now we want to kind of bring them down, continuing to get them further and further down the funnel. Sorry, Greg.

SPEAKER_00 18:43

You yeah, one thing I would say with remarketing as well, just like we've kind of said with everything, is keep it simple. There's no need to get it like too over the top. Um, I don't really see ads like this anymore. Maybe they kind of went away, but when I was working in Chicago, I constantly was doing remarketing ads that were just like way extreme. They were super fun to work on. Like I built a video game. One was a video game where it was Greg and named it Greg. His whole goal was to make it to school on time, but he had to collect coins on the way in order to get. We were working for Cox Communications, which is all about internet speeds, right? And so he had to get that Wi-Fi boost so that he could run fast and get to school on time or something like that. And like super fun project to make, but like it didn't do well. We didn't convert people because it was way too complex, way too over the top for internet. Like no one was buying internet. So make sure you're keeping it simple and to the point so that people are really engaged and you're answering those type of questions that people might be, you know, worrying about and and whatnot. So as we talk about this, the most important thing that you can be doing, like we've talked about, is creating these augment audiences and segmenting them. So, Nikki, can you talk a little bit more about segmentation and how that works and what the you know, what takeaways there are when we talk about segmentation?

SPEAKER_01 20:14

Yeah. So now we have the foundation in place. We have the uh Metapixel install installed, we have your Google tag installed, but the technical side is done. And honestly, like I said, if you've if you take anything from this episode, just make sure that you guys get that installed, whether you want to run Facebook ads now or not. So that's step one. Okay. Now let's talk about what you actually show to people, because not everybody should be seeing the same ad as Greg kind of touched on. You have to think of it in segments. For example, somebody who looked at a family tour versus somebody who maybe looked at an adventure tour page. Those are going to be completely two different ads. Somebody who visited a page versus somebody maybe who um started the process of booking two separate ads, a first-time visitor versus somebody who's already been on a tour event, um, two different types of messaging, right? And the reason that this matters is simple. As Greg said, segmented audiences are going to perform better every single time because the more specific your messages, the more it feels like you're speaking directly to that person. And maybe I'm confusing our previous episode episode because we talked a lot about segmenting and personalizing messages and email marketing, but it's hand in hand and it's the exact same thing because that is what is going to drive results. Relevance is what makes remarketing work, not just in the email marketing, but in Facebook ads, retargeting in all remarketing ads. So instead of running one general ad to everybody, you're matching the messaging to where you are or where that person is at in the journey. And the really cool part is you do not need a massive budget to do this because you're not. Targeting everybody. You're targeting people who have only shown interest. So great, let's break this down just a little bit more. Why do you think a warm audience typically will require a lower budget than a cold audience?

SPEAKER_00 22:16

Just think about anything in life like that you do personally. If you like something, you're more likely to buy it than if you don't even know what it is. Right? So my kids are constantly, they see commercials because I'm too cheap to buy the, you know, ad-free versions of things. Plus, I think it's good for them to see ads and know that TV's just not a non nonstop going thing. But they're constantly like, oh, I need this toy, I need this toy, because they saw an ad. They didn't know what that toy was, and now it's like the thing that they need most in life. So as adults, we're a little bit maybe not quite that extreme, but the more you see something and you like it, the more you're gonna be warmer up to buying it. So it's just natural that you know you're gonna buy things as you know more about it than just randomly buying stuff. So some some key stats to think about in you know this this uh remarketing is that typically the cost per click is lower. Typically the cost per acquisition is 20 to 40 percent lower on remarketing than other than other methods. The return on ad spend can be six to fifteen times better than other ad spend you might have, which that makes sense as well. Like you're gonna be able to sell someone that already knows about your trip a lot easier than someone that's never heard of you. And then remembering that even small budgets, $5, $10 a day can work. And I will say that more money doesn't always mean better results. If you're just throwing money at out the window to everyone, you're probably not gonna see as good of results as if you're spending five dollars a day on a very targeted, segmented list. So just making sure that your lists are really segmented to what you want to be spending money on and then adjusting your budget to maximize that, right? So if you're spending five dollars a day and you're getting conversions, go and spend ten dollars a day. Are you still getting the same number of conversions? Are you getting more? Is the return on ad spend going up or down? And then adjust accordingly. If it's going up, then maybe put $15 a day and see if it goes up again. If it's going up, just keep putting more because you're obviously getting more return from the investment you're putting in. So this should be 100% a core layer of your ad strategy because you're targeting a warm audience, people that are have already shown interest. So if you're not doing it, start today. It's pretty easy. You should have already put your pixel on because we talked about that a few episodes ago, I believe. But if you haven't, go and put your pixel in your Google tag on your website, get tracking, and then implement what we're talking about here, and you're gonna start seeing benefits as you work on it and make sure it's optimized to your audience.

SPEAKER_01 25:17

Awesome. All right, to wrap this up, hopefully the last few episodes have been really valuable because we're walking through these really foundational pieces that you should have in place as a tour operator. And honestly, not just tour operators, any small businesses. And I say that because we have these things in place ourselves, and it's things that we're constantly involving and learning about and improving. So practice what I practice what I preach, I promise, or at least I try to. Um at the end of the day, this is all working together. You've got your lead not lead magnets capturing demand. You've got your email marketing nurturing those prospects, you've got remarketing keeping in front of those people, whether they give you your information, their information or not. This is how your marketing is just, like I said, going to keep stacking. And then you have your social media posts going and you have all these other things. So at the end, you don't want to just rely on one channel. You start building a system. And that's really the key takeaway here. Remarketing is just another layer to that. So it's not that complicated to get started, as Greg said, but it is incredibly powerful when it's um set up correctly. So we kind of told you first steps. As you get more advanced, your messaging, your creatives, your segmentation are going to take some experience. So, and I say that because you know we say it's easy to set up, but I don't want you to just go in and throw money at some Facebook ads because you put your meta, uh, because you put your Facebook pixel on your website and your Google tag on and all of that. Like, no, it does take a little bit of nuances and testing things. You have to pay attention to your metrics. You have to dial it in over time. But like I said, like Greg said, step one is simple. If you don't have that tracking setup, that's where you start. Without that, like I said, nothing is going to work. And once that's in place, you can start building an asset that's going to work for you over time. All right. That is another episode of the Tor Operator Growth Podcast. So really excited for what's coming up. We're going to start transitioning out of the planning stage and go into the booking stage. But before we do, we have a few extra special good episodes coming in that are still involving the planning stage of the Resmark Growth Engine. And as always, if you like this episode, please, please do us a favor and subscribe or like, leave a comment if you want to be a guest on the show. Drop me an email, text message. We'd love to have a conversation. Thanks for joining us. We'll see you on the next episode.