A Short-Term Rental, a Simple Funnel: The Ad System Built for Rose of the Dunes

Airbnb's own search algorithm can only do so much for a property competing against hundreds of similar listings in the same beach town. Rose of the Dunes needed a way to bring its own qualified traffic to the listing instead of waiting to get discovered.

The Challenge

Rose of the Dunes is a 13-guest entire-home rental in Panama City Beach, built for groups and multi-family trips. The goal was straightforward but not easy: generate consistent booking inquiries during slower periods, without relying entirely on Airbnb's internal search to surface the listing to the right people.

What We Did

• Designed a purpose-built funnel: Facebook ad, simple landing page, Airbnb listing, instead of sending cold traffic directly to a third-party booking page
• Built landing page messaging and structure around answering 'who is this home for' in under 10 seconds
• Developed audience targeting specific to group and family travelers within driving distance of Panama City Beach
• Wrote multiple ad copy angles (group-focused, family-focused, and weekend-getaway framing) to test which resonated
• Set up a testing and retargeting plan to refine performance week over week rather than judging results after 48 hours

The Work

Sending paid traffic straight to an Airbnb listing wastes budget. There's no way to pre-qualify who clicks through. We built a landing page as the middle step specifically to filter for the right audience before they ever hit the booking page, so ad spend converts at a higher rate and the metrics that matter (link clicks, cost per click, booking inquiries) are actually trackable instead of buried inside Airbnb's own analytics.