Facebook opens Collection ad format to Dynamic Ads for Travel campaigns

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Ahead of the holiday travel season, Facebook is giving airline and hotel brands new tools to catch people’s attentions.

Brands retargeting travel-minded consumers through Facebook’s Dynamic Ads for Travel product can now use its full-screen, immersive Collection ad format for their campaigns, the company announced on Monday.

Facebook introduced the iAd-like, mobile-only ad format in March 2017 for retailers who want to not only showcase their wares but sell some by linking a splashy photo or video to a product catalog. Now the company is extending the brand-friendly, performance-minded ad format to airline and hotel brands that want to win over holiday travelers.

In addition to extending its latest eye-catching ad format to travel advertisers, Facebook is adding a couple of new cosmetic features for these marketers to grab people’s attention while they scroll through their News Feeds.

Now, when a Dynamic Ad for Travel campaign appears in a person’s feed, Facebook will top it with a list of their friends who have previously traveled to the city being advertised, similar to the way Facebook lists which friends have liked an advertiser’s Page atop a regular News Feed ad. And to make it more likely that a person may be interested in booking a trip, advertisers can now include the price of a flight or hotel room as an overlay atop the images in their ads.

Facebook’s Dynamic Ads for Travel can now feature social context (left) and pricing overlays (right).

While airline advertisers can only list actual prices in the overlay, hotel marketers can also feature a strike-through price to indicate a discount or the discounted percentage, according to Facebook’s Advertiser Help Center. Brands can customize the shape of the overlay, where it appears atop an image, its font and the color of its background and text.

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About The Author

Tim Peterson

Tim Peterson, Third Door Media's Social Media Reporter, has been covering the digital marketing industry since 2011. He has reported for Advertising Age, Adweek and Direct Marketing News. A born-and-raised Angeleno who graduated from New York University, he currently lives in Los Angeles. He has broken stories on Snapchat's ad plans, Hulu founding CEO Jason Kilar's attempt to take on YouTube and the assemblage of Amazon's ad-tech stack; analyzed YouTube's programming strategy, Facebook's ad-tech ambitions and ad blocking's rise; and documented digital video's biggest annual event VidCon, BuzzFeed's branded video production process and Snapchat Discover's ad load six months after launch. He has also developed tools to monitor brands' early adoption of live-streaming apps, compare Yahoo's and Google's search designs and examine the NFL's YouTube and Facebook video strategies.