Overview
Retargeting aims to help you convert visitors who didn't book your property into bookers by displaying your property's brand ad through popular ad networks, including Google. This article offers a general overview of the Retargeting tab in the Digital Marketing Performance Dashboard (formerly Cloudbeds Amplify) of your Cloudbeds PMS.
With Retargeting, you can:
Stay top-of-mind with strategically placed display ads across the web
Design and customize your own campaign, tailored to your unique needs and budget
Gain influence over travelers who are actively planning their stay
Reengage travelers already interested in your property
Watch the video below for an overview of Retargeting and how it helps bring interested travelers back to your property to complete their booking.
From lookers to bookers
Retargeting supports your direct booking strategy by allowing you to create your own ad with AI-generated content and define your campaign budget.
Access Retargeting to edit your property image, adjust your budget, and add personalized AI-generated text in your preferred voice and tone (professional, casual, humorous, or friendly), according to your intention and brand style. You can also use Auto-optimize to let AI refresh your ad text based on recent reservation trends and guest persona signals.
💡Continue reading below to learn how to customize your campaign.
Where your ads will appear
It would be difficult and nearly impossible to share a complete list of sites in our network, as we have access to a wide variety of large and small websites. Our network includes everything from well-known sites like weather.com, nypost.com, and nytimes.com to more niche and country-specific websites like gardenseeker.co.uk, finanzaonline.com, and many others.
Our retargeting strategy displays your ads on tens of thousands of websites using cookies to track visitors. This allows us to target your audience based on their online behavior. Our primary targets are visitors who leave your website or booking engine without making a purchase, and our system retargets them wherever they go online, ensuring maximum visibility for your ads.
You can track your ads' performance in our retargeting dashboard. Seeing your ads generate "views" means they effectively reach your audience.
Customize your campaign
- Your ad can only be displayed once your audience has reached a large enough size. See the section About your tracking code in Step 2 below.
- The goal of retargeting is to inspire people to come back to your website and make a booking. Retargeting ads are very targeted since they are only shown to people who already know about your brand. The person they are reaching has already visited your website or Booking Engine. This increase in reach and frequency of your brand impressions to your audience influences the audience to complete the booking with your property.
- Retargeting works towards impressions. Impressions mean that the ad was shown to your audience. Some audiences will click on your ad, but far more will go back to Google to find your property again or to their open tab with your website on it and complete the booking.
- Retargeting requires an audience to work. Keep marketing your property and finding ways to drive traffic. Retargeting helps complete the marketing funnel for your property.
- Go to the Digital Marketing Performance Dashboard and click the Retargeting tab.
- Click Get Started. The Sign up for Retargeting drawer opens.
- Review the campaign information, including the Retargeting features, applicable monthly fee, ad budget, and requirements.
- Click Continue.
- Review and select the preferred number of credits for your campaign.
- To keep your campaign funded automatically, enable Auto-refill credits and select the refill amount. To control how many automatic refills can occur in a calendar month, enable Max refills per month and select the maximum number of refills.
- Review your payment method. Add a valid payment method if one is not already available.
- Review and accept the applicable Terms and Conditions.
- Click Sign up.
Auto-refill limits: You can set a maximum number of automatic refills per month to help control your campaign spend. Learn more about monthly refill limits, reset timing, and what happens when the limit is reached in the Digital Marketing General FAQ.
If you can't click on Get Started, make sure to enable the necessary permissions based on this user role in your Cloudbeds PMS.
Important: Credit display can take up to 2 minutes. If you do not see your credits after this time, refresh the page. If the issue persists, contact our Support Team.
- In the Retargeting tab, go to the Retargeting card and click Edit my ads.
- In the Build your ad drawer, click Edit image to select your property image. The uploaded image is evaluated by an AI Image Quality Validator. Images that do not meet the minimum quality requirements, with a score of 0–1, are rejected and cannot be used.
- Under Text, expand AI settings.
- Select the tone and voice and language for your ad text.
- Click Auto-generate text to generate the ad title and caption.
- Review and edit the Title and Caption fields as needed.
- Review the Auto-optimize option:
- Enable it to allow AI to analyze your completed reservations and automatically improve the caption based on the guests most likely to book.
- Leave it disabled if you prefer to manage the ad text manually.
- Click Continue to proceed.
About Auto-optimize: When enabled, AI reviews recent reservation trends and guest persona signals and can refresh your Retargeting caption on a weekly cycle. You can turn Auto-optimize off at any time.
Review Auto-optimized changes
If Auto-optimize changes your ad caption, a View changes button appears beside the Auto-optimize section in the Build your ad drawer.
- Click View changes.
- Review the following information in the Auto-optimized changes window:
- New caption: the caption created through Auto-optimize.
- Previous caption: the caption used before the optimization.
- Reasoning: the targeting profile and booking patterns that guided the optimization.
- Click Close to return to the ad builder.
About the image validator:
- Images are automatically scored from 0–5 based on quality, composition, relevance, and thumbnail performance.
- Images rated 0–1 are labeled as Failed and cannot be added to your Retargeting ad.
- Clear, bright images with minimal clutter and strong property relevance receive the highest scores.
Property image guidelines and tips
- We recommend selecting a 1,000px image of your property, such as the pool area or a cozy room, with vivid colors and less detail for optimal visibility in small sizes.
- Use an image that would inspire someone to stay at your property and is instantly recognizable as your property or destination. This may be your website's main image. It can also be a recognizable landmark or city skyline from your destination, as long as you own the image. You may also incorporate your logo into the image.
- You can change your property image and ad text at any time.
About your tracking code
- The tracking code identifies website and Booking Engine visitors who can be targeted with your Retargeting ads. This group of visitors becomes your Retargeting audience. Ads will not display until the audience is large enough.
- The necessary tracking codes are automatically added to Cloudbeds PMS.
- If you have a Cloudbeds Website, the Cloudbeds team adds the necessary tracking code to your website.
- If you do not have a Cloudbeds Website, copy the tracking code to your website for better results. The tracking code for third-party websites must be added to the <head> section of every page.
You'll receive notifications when your Retargeting campaign credits reach the following thresholds:
- Less than 25% remaining
- Less than 10% remaining
- 0%: campaign paused until credits are added
Auto-refill: If Auto-refill credits is active for your campaign, the 25%, 10%, and 0% credit-balance notifications listed above are not generated. If you set Max refills per month, a separate notification is shown the first time an automatic refill is suppressed because the monthly limit has been reached. Learn more about monthly refill limits in the Digital Marketing General FAQ.
Example notification:
To manage your notification preferences:
-
In the top bar, click the bell Notifications icon.
- In the panel, select Notifications settings
- Enable the Retargeting budget notifications for the three thresholds (25%, 10%, and 0%), and adjust any other alerts you want. You can also unselect the types of notifications you prefer not to receive.
-
Click Apply to save.
If the Retargeting tab is not available in your Digital Marketing Performance Dashboard, contact our dedicated team for further assistance.
If you have any questions about Retargeting, visit our frequently asked questions.
Comments
Please sign in to leave a comment.