"The ads get loads of clicks, but nothing happens." It's the sentence we hear most from Ibiza business owners who have tried Instagram and Facebook advertising on their own. The ads usually aren't the problem. Somewhere between the tap on the ad and the confirmed booking, people get lost, and nobody is looking at where.
Meta gives you exactly what you ask for
Every Meta ads campaign starts with an objective: awareness, traffic, engagement, leads or sales. That choice tells the algorithm who to show your ad to. Pick "traffic" and Meta finds the people most likely to click, who are often not the people most likely to book. A followers campaign set to optimise for profile visits will bring profile visits, which is not the same thing as followers. If the goal is reservations, the campaign has to be built around a booking or enquiry event, not around clicks. It sounds obvious, but a lot of the wasted ad spend we see across the island starts with this one setting.
A link click is not a website visit
Open Ads Manager and compare two numbers: link clicks and landing page views. The gap between them is the number of people who tapped your ad and never actually saw your website. On a slow mobile page, inside Instagram's in-app browser, that gap can be enormous. We have seen campaigns where only a small fraction of the clicks ever arrived. The usual culprits are heavy images and pages that take too long to load on a phone, plus ads shown on Audience Network, Meta's partner apps, where accidental taps are common. Fix the page speed, consider removing Audience Network from placements, and optimise for landing page views rather than clicks. That alone often changes the results more than any new creative.
The Meta Pixel has to see the booking
The Meta Pixel is the small piece of code that tells Meta what people do on your website after clicking an ad. Here's the trap: many Ibiza hotels, villas and restaurants take bookings through an external booking engine. If the pixel sits on your website but not on the booking confirmation page, Meta is measuring interest, not bookings. It optimises towards people who start booking, not people who finish, and your reports look better than reality. Before spending another euro, check that a purchase or lead event fires on the thank-you page. Use the Test Events tool in Events Manager, and ideally set up the Conversions API too, which sends booking data from the server and isn't blocked by browsers or ad blockers.
Target where your guests actually are
For a hotel or villa, the people booking a stay in Ibiza mostly aren't on the island. They're in London, Milan, Amsterdam, Munich or Madrid, planning. Targeting "people in Ibiza" spends the budget on residents and on visitors who have already booked somewhere else. Build campaigns around your real source markets, and write the ad in their language. For restaurants, beach clubs and experiences it's the opposite: the right audience is people travelling in Ibiza right now, plus residents for the off-season. Same platform, completely different setup. That's why a copy-paste campaign rarely works for everyone.
Retargeting: a holiday is a slow decision
Nobody books a week in Ibiza after seeing one ad. They look, save, compare, talk to whoever they're travelling with, and come back weeks later. Retargeting means showing ads to people who have already interacted with you: website visitors, people who watched your videos, people who engaged with your Instagram. It's usually the cheapest booking you'll get. Use long windows, because a website audience can go back 180 days and engagement audiences even longer. Keep the creative short too. A six-to-eight-second reminder works best: the hook, the offer, a clear call to action. They already know the story, so remind them why they wanted to come.
Timing and budget for an island season
Summer in Ibiza is booked in winter and spring. If your ads only start in May, you're paying peak-season prices to reach people who have mostly decided already. Start the main booking campaigns between January and April, and keep a smaller retargeting budget running all year. Once a campaign is live, leave it alone. Meta's algorithm needs a learning phase, roughly fifty conversions a week per ad set according to Meta's own guidance, and editing budgets or audiences every few days keeps resetting it. Fewer campaigns, with a clear job each, almost always beat many small ones.
Measure the number that pays the bills
Cost per click, reach and likes are easy to report and easy to feel good about. The numbers that matter are cost per booking or enquiry and, for e-commerce or hotels with values passed to the pixel, return on ad spend. If a campaign brings fewer clicks but more bookings, it's the better campaign, every time.
A quick checklist before your next campaign
- The objective is sales or leads, built on a real booking or enquiry event.
- The Meta Pixel fires on the confirmation or thank-you page, tested in Events Manager.
- The landing page loads in under three seconds on a phone.
- Landing page views are close to link clicks, not a fraction of them.
- Audiences match where your customers actually are, in their language.
- A retargeting campaign with long windows is running alongside prospecting.
- You're judging results by cost per booking, not cost per click.
Good ads and good organic content work together. Ads bring people to an account and a website that need to convince them on their own, which is why we cover what your social media should actually be doing and how to get found on Google as part of the same picture. If you'd rather hand the whole thing over, ads management is part of what we do for Ibiza businesses.