How Melia Hotels International increased ROAS by 670% with Facebook Dynamic Ads for Travel

The case

Facebook Dynamic Ads for Travel (DAT) are fuelled by a Facebook Catalog. While only one Catalog is required to run ads in multiple countries, a variety of localized data feeds are required to showcase different offerings and languages. Therefore, in getting their ad campaigns up and running, Meliá faced three key challenges.

1. Customizing hotel feeds for 40 different markets

In order to build and broadcast the right ads to the right users, Meliá would need to create a variety of high-quality, market-specific hotel feeds. Since each hotel offering will be different and unique, Meliá would need to craft each feed individually. This includes compiling data on hotel details like, location, base prices, and descriptions.

To further complicate their work, each feed would need to adhere to Facebook’s unique feed specifications, including titles lengths and the format of each fields’ content. Each and every feed would also need to be updated and exported regularly to ensure the Facebook Catalog was always stocked with the most up-to-date hotel offerings. With traditional manual methods, these updates could easily take weeks to months of support from IT, even to make the simplest feed changes.

2. Preparing language and country feeds for DAT

For global advertisers, Facebook also require language and country feeds for each target market. Which meant, in addition to the specially-tailored hotel feeds, Meliá would also need to create a multitude of secondary feeds that would be used to override their main feed for different countries and languages.

With accommodation offerings in nearly 50 countries and in Spanish, English, French, Italian, Portuguese, and German, this would be a huge task for the Meliá team, and starting from scratch would be near impossible.

3. Correcting image size and format

High-quality images are important to any high converting hotel ad, but on Facebook, they are critical. Not only would Meliá need to make sure that all of their images were in the correct size and format, but they’d also need to ensure their images were compelling and capable of standing out from an already crowded News Feed. With hundreds of hotels, even basic image resizing would take months in addition to the time already spent on structuring their feeds.

The solutions

Fortunately, these challenges were more than manageable for Meliá since they were already using Productsup to mange their feeds. With the help of the platform, creating perfectly tailored, channel-ready Facebook feeds was quick and painless. Produtsup powered their team in four primary ways.

1. Integrated feed templates and an intuitive interface

With Productsup’s predefined Facebook Dynamic Ads for Travel Hotel feed template, Meliá was able to create their feed quickly and drastically reduce the time needed to structure a feed according to Facebook’s requirements.

These templates, combined with the platform's intuitive drag-and-drop functionality, meant that Meliá only needed to map data from their original feed to their new Facebook Hotel templates. Now, instead of taking weeks to months to prepare new feeds, Meliá created perfectly structured, market-specific feeds in less than a day.

2. Easy content cleanup

Meliá’s old approach to product data management required waiting weeks for IT to perform even the most fundamental feed edits like removing unnecessary HTML from hotel titles. Often, the end result was still incorrect and messy. With Productsup, however, these issues were quickly eliminated.

Locating and removing HTML tags was quick and easy with Productsup. Meliá simply added the Remove HTML rule box to their feed, automatically applying the designated changes across each and every field–instantly cleansing their entire feed. What used to take weeks could now be done in seconds.

3. Quick image editing

Adhering to Facebook’s image requirements was no issue for Meliá. Using the Productsup Image resize tool, they were able to automatically resize every single image in their feeds according to Facebook’s specifications with a single click.

With the time saved, they were able to go even a step further and create vertical and horizontal images for different sized banner ads. All of this was conveniently achieved within the Productsup platform.

Results

Thanks to Productsup, Meliá now has Facebook Dynamic Ads for Travel campaigns up and running in 40+ countries. More importantly, they achieved this without any manual work or support from IT.

Reduced time to market: While the preparation of a single feed used to take up weeks to months of time, Meliá can now export a perfectly polished feed within 24 hours.

Gained control: With a reputation for being leaders in the industry, Meliá is recognized for doing things a little differently from the rest. Case in point, instead of the performance marketing team, it’s actually the design team at Meliá who prepare their hotel feeds for Facebook. In any case, they have eliminated their dependence on IT and are able to focus more on feed quality.

Improved performance: The Productsup software has allowed Meliá to give their design team full control of feed management for all global markets. The shift not only saved time but has drastically improved performance, resulting in a 6.7× increase in Return on Ad Spend (ROAS).