Every short-term rental manager knows they need more direct bookings. Your OTA commissions are eating into margins. Algorithmic changes are unpredictable. And building a sustainable business requires owning your guest relationships.
For years, the go-to solution has been remarketing: advertising to and nurturing repeat business from people who already showed interest in your properties. It delivers great ROI. The results are predictable, and the risk feels manageable.
But it's time we face up to an uncomfortable truth: remarketing isn't going to solve your direct booking problem.
Remarketing can only work on people already in your funnel. Even if you perfect your remarketing campaigns, you're still only reaching people who already know you exist. Generously, that's probably around 10% of potential guests in your market.
The other 90%? They've never heard of you. They don't visit your website and never see your social media. They book with your competitors or stick with OTAs because, from their perspective, you don't exist. (And the OTAs want to keep it that way.)
You can optimize remarketing to perfection and still be stuck with OTA dependency. Remarketing, by definition, does not solve new guest acquisition.
We got addicted to remarketing because it feels like progress.
When OTAs handle new guest discovery and we handle conversion optimization, everyone stays in their lane. OTAs cast wide nets, and STR managers nurture warm leads. This seems like a logical division of labor until you realize you're optimizing yourself into a smaller corner.
The problem compounds over time:
Meanwhile, potential guests are actively planning trips to your area and have never heard of you. They're going to book somewhere. If your marketing budget goes primarily to remarketing, you may not even be in the conversation.
In other words, remarketing optimizes dependence.
When remarketing hits its ceiling, the logical next step seems to be “spray-and-pray” pay-per-click (PPC) ads or social media campaigns.
But broad advertising is where STR marketing budgets go to die. OTAs spend millions dominating generic “vacation rental” terms, and even if you could compete, generic ads can't communicate what travelers actually need: availability, specific amenities, exact location, and real-time pricing.
That’s why forward-thinking STR managers are turning to a more refined strategy: targeted advertising.
Targeted advertising used to mean uploading a list of past guests and asking Facebook for a lookalike audience. Or starting with narrow traveler personas: "mom of two kids that drives an SUV from Atlanta to visit Orange Beach." Then, you advertise your company or destinations and send traffic to your homepage or destination page.
But this approach is outdated. It misses potential guests who've never been to your area, or potential audiences you might not think to target, like golf trips, small group retreats, or retired couples booking weekday stays. And it doesn’t reach them with specific properties they might be interested in.
The real breakthrough in targeted advertising: letting platforms define your audience for you.
For example, Meta knows an enormous amount of detail about their users, including who's actively planning trips to your destination markets. Their platform sees 300+ pages of booking intent signals across the web:
So instead of telling Meta exactly who to find, show them what success looks like (a booking) and let their algorithms discover everyone who wants what you're offering. Instead of building a narrow audience, start with property profiles, then let the platform match your properties to everyone who could be interested.
This also means advertising specific, individual properties — not destinations.
Example: Someone looking for a four-bedroom beach house in Panama City Beach for spring break should see an ad for and land on your four-bedroom beach house in Panama City Beach with:
When you send qualified traffic directly to the property that matches what they're searching for — the closest point to booking with all the information they need — your conversion rates and return on ad spend (ROAS) will soar.
This approach to targeted paid social is the next evolution in vacation rental optimization.
Over the past decade, the industry has seen three major revenue leaps: Professional photography drove double-digit revenue increases by showcasing properties more effectively. Together, dynamic pricing and revenue management had a similar impact by optimizing rates based on demand.
Each innovation didn't create new demand. They captured existing demand more efficiently.
The demand for your properties already exists. Travelers are already planning trips to your area. The booking intent is already there. The question is: how can you reach them?
The technology that powers this approach already transformed advertising for a deceptively similar industry: automotive.
When auto dealers faced the same aggregator dependency, with AutoTrader and Cars.com extracting increasing fees for decreasing value, the breakthrough came through vehicle-specific targeting.
Instead of advertising "Ford dealership," dealers used new technology developed by Advance Local to advertise specific VINs to people shopping for that exact make, model, year, and price range. This shift drove game-changing results — 200% increases in web traffic, 43% improvements in inventory turn rates — and helped dealers reclaim customer relationships while reducing aggregator dependence
In 2024, Advance Local introduced that same technology to short-term rentals through BookingsCloud’s targeted advertising platform.
Here’s how the BookingsCloud platform works:
Along the way, BookingsCloud provides campaign reporting and management to help you understand how your ad spend translates to measurable conversions and increased website traffic.
Most vacation rental managers are still stuck optimizing remarketing or burning money on broad advertising. The managers who adopt precision targeting first will capture market share before this becomes standard practice.
Think about when you could be the first property on Airbnb in your market. The same opportunity exists now with targeted paid social. You're competing against managers who don't know this approach exists yet.
The numbers tell the story. Precision targeting delivers up to 18x ROI compared to 2-3x from broad campaigns.
“[BookingsCloud] software has made marketing our homes—especially those needing a little extra attention—an absolute breeze. Since signing on, we've seen a noticeable increase in bookings, and it's clear their targeted advertising strategies are making a real impact.” — Jessie Moore, Lewis Realty Associates’ Topsail Vacation Rentals, North Carolina
Right now, early adopters are building sustainable competitive advantages while their competition remains unaware of the possibility.
Remarketing will always be important for converting website visitors and nurturing past guests for repeat bookings. But it can't solve the direct booking challenge alone because it doesn't address the fundamental problem: most potential guests don't know you exist.
The complete solution combines precision targeting for new guest acquisition with remarketing for conversion optimization:
Each component serves a different purpose. Together, they build a complete system that reduces OTA dependence while maintaining growth.
The goal isn't to eliminate remarketing or abandon other marketing channels. The goal is to stop relying on OTAs for new guest discovery while building a direct booking engine that actually scales.
Remarketing optimized your conversion funnel. Now it’s time to fill that funnel with guests you found yourself.
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