Tips and Best Practices to Effectively Optimize Travel Campaigns 

With paid search accounting for over 50% of digital ad spend in the travel industry, it’s critical for advertisers to make sure their campaigns are well optimized in order to remain competitive and produce results. As holiday travel ramps up and the new year approaches, consider the following tips and best practices to get the most out of your search marketing efforts.

Seasonality

The effect of seasonality can be seen across a number of verticals, but is especially important to consider when advertising in the travel space. Understanding how seasonality affects your business, and incorporating that information into your search strategy can have a major impact on the success of your campaigns. For example, a ski resort may choose to allocate a higher percentage of their annual ad spend during winter months to accommodate spikes in search volume for ski trips. Given sufficient data, an advertiser may also choose to increase bids, or even day part ads to serve on days where conversions are historically higher. While it’s necessary to maximize ad spend in peak season, low season presents a great opportunity to prospect (usually at lower CPCs) and build audiences – all with the intention of remarketing and converting these users during peak season. 

Keywords

As with any search campaign, continual keyword analysis and optimization is one of the most effective ways to increase performance. Auditing your search terms report and adding negative keywords on a weekly or monthly basis can help ensure you’re serving ads on the right search queries. You may be inclined to target common or generic keywords like “places to stay in Denver”, but due to competition these keywords will drive up CPCs and exhaust daily budgets. Instead, consider using long-tail keywords based on local attractions or upcoming events such as “places to stay in Denver near Civic Center” or “places to stay in Denver for Broncos game”. Taking this approach to your keyword targeting can help you remain competitive in the auction, even on a smaller budget.

Ad Copy

Consumer purchase decisions in the travel industry are typically based on price, quality, and perks. Ad copy is a great way to express what makes you unique among competitors. Consider highlighting special rates, unique amenities, and any other Unique Selling Propositions (USP) in your ad copy. It’s also essential to utilize ad extensions. Sitelink, promotion, callout, location, and call extensions increase the prominence of your ads on the search results page and can contribute to higher CTRs. You can leverage Google Analytics data to see what are the most popular pages on your website to implement as sitelinks. Try testing different extensions and review performance data to see what resonates most with your audience, and what doesn’t.

Bid Adjustments

In competitive verticals like travel, it’s important to think critically about what unique optimization opportunities and levers can be pulled to squeeze the most impact out of your campaigns. Weather can play a key role in when consumers decide to plan and book trips. For example, news of an upcoming snow storm may correlate to a sudden increase in users searching for information on lodging at ski resorts. Adjusting your keyword, ad schedule, and location bids accordingly ahead of a significant weather event may allow you to capture larger impression share, and increase your conversion volume. Geographic and user location reports can also be viewed directly in Google Ads and can be used to help you understand which states, cities, and even zip codes are converting, allowing you to adjust your location bids respectively.

Bid Strategy

Choosing the right bid strategy for your travel campaigns can depend on a number of factors such as: how much existing campaign data you have access to (if any), what conversions you are tracking, or what are your KPIs/goals for the campaign.

In many cases, paid search will serve the purpose of capturing and converting users towards the bottom of your marketing funnel after they’ve been exposed to your brand in previous, higher funnel touchpoints. If you have the ability to track revenue – Maximize Conversions, Maximize Conversion Value or even Target ROAS can all be effective bidding strategies. If you are launching a brand new campaign and don’t have substantial performance data, you may want to start with Maximize Clicks to help train Google’s machine learning before moving to a conversion based bid strategy. Advertisers who want better control over their CPCs, or aren’t seeing sufficient results using Smart Bidding may opt to use a manual bid strategy such as Manual CPC or Enhanced CPC. As with most things in digital, it’s best to test, measure and optimize to find out what works best for you.