How Meliá Hotels International increased Return on ad spend (ROAS) by 670% with Facebook Dynamic Ads for Travel

Case

Meliá Hotels International is the largest hotel group in Spain, and the 17th biggest hotel chain worldwide. With over 370 hotels located in 43 countries and 4 continents, the hospitality brand is a market leader and globally recognized name. The chain is marketed under the following brands: Gran Meliá, Meliá, Paradisus Resorts, ME by Meliá, Innside by Meliá, TRYP by Wyndham, Sol Hotels, and Club Meliá.

Today’s hoteliers need to be online in order to meet consumers at each stage of the booking funnel. To reach a wider audience and users outside of their usual targeting strategies, Meliá Hotels International needed to adjust its approach. Not only did they need to streamline their strategy across markets, but they also wanted to scale up. To achieve this, they focused their attention on Facebook Dynamic Ads for Travel.

Challenges

• Customizing hotel feeds for 40 different markets
• Preparing language and country feeds for DAT
• Correcting image size and format

To build and display the right ads to the right users, Meliá had to create a variety of high-quality, market-specific hotel feeds. As each hotel offering is different and unique, Meliá built each feed individually. This included hotel data such as location, prices, and descriptions.

To further complicate their work, each feed needed to adhere to Facebook’s unique feed specifications, including title length and the format of each fields’ content. Each feed had to be updated and exported regularly to ensure the Facebook Catalog was always populated with the latest hotel offerings. With traditional manual methods, these updates could easily take weeks or months of support from IT, even for the most straightforward feed changes.

For global advertisers, Facebook also requires language and country feeds for each target market. This means that in addition to the specially-tailored hotel feeds, Meliá had to create several secondary feeds which accompanied the main feed for the different countries and languages.

With accommodation offerings in nearly 50 countries in Spanish, English, French, Italian, Portuguese, and German, this would have been an enormous if not impossible task for the Meliá team.

cFor global advertisers, Facebook also requires language and country feeds for each target market. This means that in addition to the specially-tailored hotel feeds, Meliá had to create several secondary feeds which accompanied the main feed for the different countries and languages.

With accommodation offerings in nearly 50 countries in Spanish, English, French, Italian, Portuguese, and German, this would have been an enormous if not impossible task for the Meliá team.

Solutions

• Integrated feed templates and an intuitive interface
• Easy content cleanup
• Quick image editing

Fortunately, these challenges were not insurmountable for Meliá. They had already been using Productsup to manage their feeds. With the platform's help, creating perfectly tailored, channel-ready Facebook feeds became a quick and painless process. Productsup powers their business in four main ways.

With Productsup’s predefined Facebook Dynamic Ads for Travel Hotel feed template, Meliá can create feeds quickly and reduce the time spent structuring feeds to Facebook’s requirements.

Together with the templates, the platform's intuitive drag-and-drop functionality means that Meliá only needs to map data from their original feed to their new Facebook Hotel templates. Instead of taking weeks or months to prepare new feeds, Meliá creates perfectly structured, market-specific feeds in less than a day.

Meliá’s legacy approach to product data management meant waiting weeks for IT to perform basic edits such as removing HTML from hotel titles. The end results were often incorrect and messy. With Productsup, however, quickly eliminated these issues.

Locating and removing HTML tags is quick and easy with Productsup. Meliá simply added the “Remove HTML” rule box to their feed and applied the changes across all fields, instantly cleaning their entire feed. What used to take weeks could now be done in seconds.

Adhering to Facebook’s image requirements became easy for the Meliá team. Using the Productsup Image resize tool, the team could automatically resize every image in the feeds according to Facebook’s specifications with a single click.

They invested the time they saved in creating vertical and horizontal images for different-sized banner ads. The Productsup platform made this all very easy.

Results

• Reduced time to market
• More control
• Improved performance

Thanks to Productsup, Meliá runs Facebook Dynamic Ads for Travel campaigns in over 40 countries. Nearly all processes were automated, and they now work independently of IT.

Preparing single feeds used to take weeks or months, Meliá can now export a perfectly polished feed within 24 hours.

A leader in its industry, Meliá likes to do things differently. Instead of the performance marketing team, it’s Meliá’s design team which prepares the Facebook feeds. Whoever is doing the work, they no longer need IT to execute campaigns, and they can invest more time in feed quality.

The Productsup platform hands Meliá’s design team full control of feed management for all global markets. The shift not only saved time but dramatically improved performance, resulting in a seven-fold increase in ROAS.