What 300 live Booking.com ads reveal about their Google and Meta strategy

Roman | Ad Intel Lab — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 16:30:34 +0000

Booking.com spends more on performance marketing than almost any company in travel. You can't see their budget, but you can see their ads: Google and Meta both publish every ad an advertiser runs, in the Google Ads Transparency Center and the Meta Ad Library.

The problem is that both sites show ads one by one. So I exported them. I pulled 150 Google ads and 150 active Meta ads from Booking.com on October 16, 2026 and looked at what they have in common. (It's a sample, not the full account: Booking.com has thousands of ads.)

Here is what stood out.

1. Their Google text ads have been running for five years

Every one of the 150 Google ads in the sample is a text ad, and the oldest ones were first shown on October 25, 2021 and were still live today: 1,818 days. The top 8 longest-running ads are all in the 1,814–1,818 day range.

That tells you something useful about search ads at this scale: once a text ad wins, Booking.com doesn't "refresh the creative" for the sake of it. It keeps it running for years and spends its testing budget elsewhere.

Takeaway: if a competitor's search ad has been live for 3+ years, treat it as proven copy. Study its angle before you write your own.

2. On Meta, catalog ads do the heavy lifting

The Meta side looks completely different. Of the 150 active ads:

Format	Ads
Dynamic product ads (DPA, catalog)	88
Dynamic creative (DCO)	28
Single image	24
Video	10

Almost 60 % are catalog ads: one template that Meta fills with a property, a city and a price for each viewer. The copy is short and always about reducing risk:

"With free cancellation, you can stay flexible. Book the perfect stay with peace of mind."

The call to action is "Book now" on 100 of 150 ads, "Learn more" on 34 and "Sign up" on 16.

Placements: Facebook 150, Instagram 147, Messenger 23, Audience Network 20, Threads 1. In other words, Facebook + Instagram, and almost nothing else.

Takeaway: for a big catalog, Booking.com lets the algorithm pick the product and keeps the message to a single objection handler: free cancellation.

3. The longest-running Meta ads aren't for travelers

This was the surprise. When I sorted the Meta ads by days active, the top 8 were not consumer ads. They target property owners:

"Toutes les réservations dont vous rêviez." (All the bookings you dreamed of), running 579 days.
"Protección frente a reclamaciones de responsabilidad civil hasta 1.000.000€" (liability protection for hosts), 578 days.
"Con la richiesta di prenotazione puoi scegliere come ricevere le prenotazioni" (choose how you accept bookings), 578 days.
"Gagnez des revenus complémentaires" (earn extra income), 397 days.

They are in French, Spanish and Italian, all use "Learn more" and they've been live since March 2025. This is Booking.com's supply-side funnel: a quiet, always-on campaign to sign up new hosts in Europe, while the consumer ads rotate much faster.

Takeaway: when you research a marketplace, filter out the consumer ads and look at what stays live the longest. That's often the side of the business they care about most.

How to do this for your competitor in 3 minutes

I used two scrapers I built on Apify. Both are no-code (fill in a form and click Start), and the output goes to a table you can export as CSV, Excel or JSON.

Google ads with the Google Ads Transparency Scraper:

{
  "queries": ["booking.com"],
  "maxAdsPerQuery": 150
}

You get each ad's format, first and last shown dates, total days shown, the preview and the decoded text, headline and YouTube ID wherever Google exposes them.

Meta ads with the Facebook Ads Library Scraper:

{
  "queries": ["https://www.facebook.com/bookingcom"],
  "activeStatus": "active",
  "maxAdsPerQuery": 150
}

You get ad text, CTA, format, platforms, start date, days active and the number of variants. Turn on includeAdDetails to also get EU reach and an age and gender breakdown for ads shown in Europe.

Then sort by days shown or days active. The ads at the top are the ones the advertiser keeps paying for, so they are the ones worth copying the idea of.

Two more tricks:

Add monitorName to the input and schedule the run weekly. Each run returns only ads you haven't seen yet, so you get a "what did my competitor launch this week" feed.
Both tools charge per ad (from $0.60 per 1,000 on Meta) with no start fee, so a 300-ad export like this one costs well under a dollar. You can try them on the Apify free plan.

Have a brand you want me to break down next? Drop it in the comments.

DEV Community: Roman | Ad Intel Lab

What 300 live Booking.com ads reveal about their Google and Meta strategy

1. Their Google text ads have been running for five years

2. On Meta, catalog ads do the heavy lifting

3. The longest-running Meta ads aren't for travelers

How to do this for your competitor in 3 minutes