Snapchat Introduces Dynamic Travel Ads

With travel becoming more popular in many areas, Snapchat is introducing new Dynamic Travel Ads to assist travel advertisers to reach their target audience. Snap's Dynamic Vacation Ads combine offers from a company's product catalog to serve travel destinations that are appropriate to each user based on areas they've visited and things they've previously viewed.

Snap's pixel tracking, as well as Snapchat's internal data and activity tracking, are used to match user habits. Snap is also able to offer enhanced, locally relevant campaign delivery to service hotels, airlines, destinations, and excursions based on popularity thanks to visitor data from 49 million unique places included in the Snap Map.

Improved catalog preparation for travel brands, as well as extra product feed, attributes particular to travel enterprises, are part of the enhanced ad creation process. This allows for additional flexibility and extensive targeting possibilities, ensuring that the most relevant advertising is shown to each user.

Snap explains it this way:

“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.”

Snap claims that Dynamic Travel Ads have improved outcomes for Booking.com and Etihad Airways during beta testing, which has been ongoing for the past six months.

“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 purchase, compared to their non-dynamic campaigns.”

Snap also announced the launch of a new 'Location Aware' catalogs option for all of its Dynamic Ad choices. Some of this data is subject to Apple's ATT tracking prompts, which Snap has acknowledged as having influenced its results.

“For many businesses, price, availability, or messaging may differ greatly by region. Our “location-aware” catalog support allows advertisers to include 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.”

Snap claimed in Q4 last year that Apple's iOS privacy changes had harmed ad partners "who like to use lower-funnel goals, such as in-app purchases," whereas marketers who optimize via web-based goal-based bids experienced less of an impact because 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 whether the disruption from platform changes.”

The majority of the data used to fuel Dynamic Travel Ads would fall into this category, although the impact on different companies and developers would vary depending on whether users opt out of tracking. Nonetheless, the choice will open up new possibilities for travel brands, and as more companies look to ramp up their efforts in the wake of pandemic limitations, it could be a worthwhile consideration.