Skift Take

Advertisers on Meta are facing rising CPMs and diminishing returns, but travel brands don’t need to watch their ad spend evaporate. Wunderkind’s latest guide reveals how brands can reduce Meta ad waste, improve targeting, and boost ROI through more efficient identification.

This sponsored content was created in collaboration with a Skift partner.

Rising costs and fragmented targeting have made Meta advertising increasingly inefficient. Many travel brands now find themselves paying multiple times to reach the same customer across channels — or worse, targeting audiences they already engage through email or SMS.

Wunderkind’s recognition technology connects previously anonymous interactions to rich, known customer profiles — bridging gaps across the user journey, unlocking higher-intent targeting and empowering brands to know exactly who they’re paying to reach. Instead of taking a shot in the dark or approaching paid social like a gamble, brands can utilize identity resolution to connect previously anonymous interactions to recognizable customer profiles.

This personalized approach enables brands to deliver the right campaigns to the right audiences, based on real-time behavioral signals and predictive attributes, rather than taking a spray-and-pray approach. By differentiating customer segments, identifying high-value travelers, and expanding to precise new audiences based on real behaviors and preferences, travel brands can use Wunderkind to create more efficient Meta campaigns and boost ROI.

“Without knowing the owned-channel engagement of who you’re actually reaching, every Meta campaign becomes a bit of a gamble,” said Ronen Kadosh, head of travel and ticketing at Wunderkind. “You might be paying to target someone already active in your email or SMS programs. But when that visibility is in place, you shift from spending reactively to investing with purpose and precision.”

Wunderkind’s new guide, “Smarter Spend in a Noisy World,” offers a playbook for creating high-performing Meta campaigns. Drawing on Wunderkind’s proprietary data and performance insights, the guide provides a step-by-step look at how brands can reallocate budget toward known, high-intent audiences, while still fueling upper-funnel growth.

First, it sets the scene by investigating the rising costs and diminishing returns of paid social in today’s advertising landscape. It then explores several practical techniques that travel brands can use to leverage identity data to their advantage, including suppressing audience segments they already own to avoid the double-pay problem and prioritizing high-value customers who are worth investing in.

“When we suppress known low-intent audiences and prioritize high-value travelers, we don’t just improve campaign performance — we unlock budget to test, learn, and grow,” Kadosh said. “This isn’t just a media efficiency play — it’s about creating space for smarter decisions across the entire marketing strategy. Wunderkind’s proprietary data and retargeting capabilities enable brands to scale owned channel reach while reducing duplicative efforts in Meta, resulting in the marketing nirvana of more efficiency and more value.”

Success on Meta requires more than great creative. It demands smarter audience decisioning at the stack level. It requires travel brands to adopt a new mindset. This guide outlines the new paradigm, centered on fundamental strategies such as eliminating redundancies, updating audience data in real-time, and leveraging owned channels, all of which contribute to success on the platform.

“Wunderkind empowers travel brands to orchestrate campaigns based on intent, behavior, and real-time updates to audience intelligence,” Kadosh said.

Brands interested in learning to better connect customer data across platforms and making their Meta campaigns more efficient and effective will find their footing in Wunderkind’s new “Smarter Spend in a Noisy World” guide.

**In this guide, you’ll find: **

• Audience targeting techniques for travel brands looking to spend smarter
• Ways to reduce wasted ad spend by eliminating the double-pay problem
• Strategies for increasing travel marketing ROI by reaching the right people
• Real-world examples of performance gains from connected customer profiles
• Insights into the trend of rising CPMs — and techniques to counteract them
• Budgeting tips for travel brands planning their 2026 ad strategies

This content was created collaboratively byWunderkind*** and Skift’s branded content studio, SkiftX.***