Snapchat Launches ‘Dynamic Travel Ads’ to Help Travel Marketers Reach Interested Audiences

With travel back on the cards in many regions, Snapchat’s looking to help travel advertisers reach its captive audience with new Dynamic Travel Ads.

As it sounds, Snap’s Dynamic Travel Ads match offers from a business’ product catalog in order to serve travel destinations relevant to each user, based on places they’ve visited and products they’ve previously viewed.

As explained by Snap:

“Dynamically retarget users who have been to your site or app before with hotel properties, destinations or flight routes that are most interesting to them.”

The ads utilize Snap’s pixel tracking to match user behaviors, along with Snapchat’s internal data and activity tracking.

And with visitor data on 49 million unique places listed in the Snap Map, Snap’s also able to offer advanced, locally-relevant campaign delivery to serve hotels, airlines, destinations, and tours based on popularity.

An updated ad creation process also includes improved catalog setup for travel brands, with additional product feed attributes that are specific to travel businesses. That provides more customization options, enabling advanced targeting opportunities to ensure the most relevant ads are displayed to each user.

In beta testing, which has been underway over the past six months, Snap says that Dynamic Travel Ads have delivered improved results for Booking.com and Etihad Airways.

“Etihad was able to reduce their cost per flight search by 4x with Dynamic Travel Ads. Additionally, they saw a 307% increase in ROAS and a 76% decrease in cost per purchases, compared to their non-dynamic campaigns.”

In addition to this, Snap says that it’s also adding a new ‘Location Aware’ catalogs option for all of its Dynamic Ad options.

“For many businesses, price, availability, or messaging may differ greatly by region. Our “location-aware” catalog support allows advertisers to include a latitude/longitude in their catalogs, so whether they are a Retailer, Auto Dealership, Hotel Chain, or Food Delivery service, their message or offer will be tailored to wherever their customer is in the world.”

Some of this data is subject to Apple’s ATT tracking prompts, which Snap recently noted have had an impact on its results.

In Q4 last year, Snap said that Apple’s iOS privacy-related changes had impacted ad partners ‘who prefer to leverage lower-funnel goals, such as in-app purchases’, though advertisers who optimize via web-based goal-based bids saw less impact, given that many of them had adopted the Snap Pixel.

“Ultimately, first party integrations allow us to build out measurement solutions based on advertiser input and directly connect to how our formats and targeting work, so that businesses have the most accurate view of ROI. These allow us to preserve the privacy of our community while helping advertisers weather the disruption from platform changes.”

Most of the data used to power Dynamic Travel Ads would fall into the latter category, but there would be variable levels of impact on different brands and developers based on whether users choose to opt-out of tracking.

Even so, the option will provide new opportunities for travel brands, and as more look to boost their efforts in the wake of pandemic restrictions, it could be a valuable consideration.

Dynamic Travel Ads are available in all regions from today. You can learn more about how to set up Dynamic Travel campaigns here.