Nobody books a holiday on their first search. They look for a few destinations, compare prices, read reviews, talk it over with whoever they’re travelling with, and come back a week or two later. Sometimes much longer.
That’s what makes pay-per-click (PPC) advertising for travel different. Your job isn’t to win a single click. It’s to be visible at each stage of the decision, and to make it easy to enquire when they’re ready.
This guide will cover how to set up PPC to bring in travel booking leads, from tracking and campaign types through to landing pages and reporting.
What counts as a travel lead?
Before you build anything, you need to divide what you’re trying to generate. For most travel businesses, a lead is at least one of these:
- An enquiry form submission
- A phone call
- A callback request
- A qualified live chat conversation
- A quote or brochure request
These aren’t all worth the same. A call from someone asking about a specific tour usually carries more weight than a brochure download. It’s so important to speak to your sales team about which leads turn into bookings, and use that as your benchmark.
If you skip this step, you’ll end up with cheap leads that never book.
Get your tracking correct
Google’s automated bidding learns from your conversion data. If the data you provide is weak, the results will be too. Here’s some simple tips on how to get your data as strong as possible:
- Tracking each lead separately. Forms, calls and chats should be their own conversion actions, so you can see which ones drive the most value.
- Use call tracking if a lot of your bookings start on the phone. Cover calls from your ads and calls from your website.
- Set up enhanced conversion tracking for leads, where consent allows, to improve measurement accuracy.
- Use UTMs to ensure that your CRM is getting all of the useful information that’s needed to make informed decisions.
- Import offline conversions so Google can see which enquiries turned into bookings, not just which ones came in.
Offline conversion imports make the biggest difference. Without them, bidding will chase whoever fills in your form most easily, and those people aren’t always the ones who book.
Match your campaign types to the traveller’s journey
Search campaigns for people ready to enquire
Search campaigns capture people who already know what they want, such as someone typing “Safari holidays in Kenya” or “Lake Como tour packages”
- Split campaigns by destination, holiday type or priority, so you can control the budget where it matters most.
- Take care with keyword match types, and check your search terms report regularly to see what you’re actually showing for.
- Build a list of negative keywords early. Jobs, visa-only searches and flights-only searches are common ones if you don’t sell them.
- Keep brand and non-brand campaigns separate, so strong brand performance doesn’t hide weak results elsewhere.
If you’re already using search campaigns and want to test expanding your reach through broad match. Why not try AI Max to further leverage advanced machine learning.
Performance Max to widen reach
Performance Max can find enquiries across Google’s channels, but it works best with good inputs.
- Give it a strong image, video and headlines for each destination or holiday type.
- Add audience signals, such as past enquirers, to steer it in the right direction.
- Check where it’s spending. Watch search terms, placements and channel performance rather than trusting it to run itself.
Demand Gen to inspire earlier
Demand Gen puts visual ads in front of people on YouTube, Discover, and Gmail, before they’ve started searching. It suits travel well because people respond to strong imagery of a place.
You can’t judge it purely on last-click results. Its job is to start the journey, so look at engagement and how it supports your Search campaigns.
Write ads and landing pages that get people to enquire
Click-through rate is only part of the picture. The ad copy and the landing page need to work as one.
Ads
- Lead with the destination, then add what makes the trip worth booking
- Include trust signals. Reviews, ABTA membership, ATOL protection and flexible booking all help you if they apply.
- Match the call to action to your lead type, for example “Get a quote” or “Speak to a travel expert”
- Constantly test your ad copy to optimise it to be as good as possible
Landing pages
- Match the message between the ad and the page, Someone who clicked on a Peru itinerary shouldn’t land on a general home page.
- Keep forms short. Every extra field loses some people, though a qualifying question or two can improve lead quality. Test both!
- Make the phone number and enquiry button easy to find on mobile.
- Show the reviews, photos and reassurance close to the form.
- Keep the page fast. A slow page loses people before they’ve read a word.
For more on this, see our advice on landing page optimisation.
Use audiences, timing, and remarketing
Most people who visit a travel site don’t enquire on their first visit, so remarketing matters more here than in most sectors.
- Show ads to people who viewed a destination but didn’t enquire,
- Upload customer match lists of past enquirers and previous customers, to reach them again or help Google find the correct audiences.
- Plan around seasonality. Think about when people search versus when they travel, and increase budget ahead of your main booking periods rather than during them.
- Understand when certain locations are popular. You may find that people are most likely to book East Asia at completely different times to the Greek Islands. Analyse this and control your budget accordingly.
Quality over quantity
Smart bidding needs enough conversion data to work well. If you’re just starting, begin with Maximise Conversions and move to a Target CPA once you have a steady flow of leads.
If you can assign different values to different lead types, or import booking values, bid towards value rather than volume.
Try not to change targets too often. Bidding strategies need time to learn, and constant tweaks reset that process.
Quality over quantity
Cost per lead is useful, but it doesn’t tell you whether the leads are any good. A campaign that brings in cheap enquiries looks great in a report, until you find out none of them turned into bookings through your CRM. Wherever you can, compare cost per lead with cost per booking, because that’s the figure that tells you whether the spend is paying off.
Regularly ask the sales team which enquiries were a good fit and which weren’t. Try to find patterns by destination, campaign type or search term to determine where your money should be allocated. Reporting by destination and campaign type should be able to tell you where the real value is coming from, rather than blending everything into one account-level average. Furthermore, there’s proven methods out there to bring in higher quality leads from PPC.
Keep attribution in mind too. Campaigns that start the journey, like Demand Gen, often get less credit. Cut them on last click numbers alone and you may see fewer leads a few weeks later.
Common mistakes to avoid
There’s plenty of common mistakes in PPC, but here’s some that are most relevant to this industry example.
Chasing volume over quality. A lower cost per lead means little if those leads never book. Agree with your sales team what a good lead looks like and review it regularly.
Launching without proper tracking. Without call tracking and offline conversion imports, bidding favours whoever fills in your form the easiest, not whoever is most likely to book a holiday. Set it up before you spend.
Ignoring seasonality. A target that works in January, is likely to be unrealistic in June. Build seasonal shifts into your budgets, and increase spend ahead of your peak booking periods, not during them.
Leaving Performance Max unchecked. Review Performance Max search terms and placements regularly, or it can drift towards low-value traffic.
Travel has a long buying cycle, so a few days of data rarely tells the full story. Give a campaign several weeks and look at trends.
In conclusion…
Travel buyers take their time, so PPC works best when it supports the whole journey. Search captures people who are ready to enquire. Demand Gen and Performance Max reach those still deciding. Remarketing brings back the ones who left without getting in touch.
Two things underpin all of it. Get your tracking right, including calls and offline conversions, and agree with your sales team what a good lead looks like. Without those, even a well-built account will chase the wrong enquiries.
Start there, give campaigns time to learn, and judge them on bookings, not just cost per leads.
If you’d like a second opinion on your account, our team can run an audit and show you where your leads are potentially slipping away.
