How Best To Use PPC To Drive Travel Booking Leads To Boost Growth

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In the fast-evolving travel and tourism sector, digital marketing offers both challenge and opportunity for remarkable growth.

Crafting an impactful digital marketing strategy is vital in navigating your business towards enhanced visibility and awareness within the fierce competitive travel space.

19.6% of the travel industry’s website traffic comes from Paid Search, with the average conversion rate being 3.6%.

PPC is highly targeted, allowing marketers to get to the top of Google in just a few clicks. Utilising this channel early, will allow you to reach the right type of audience to increase bookings and sales.

PPC can often provide immediate results but, developing an engaging PPC strategy is more than just bidding on keywords. Paid Ads can be extremely effective as they can target specific audiences and demographics, capturing the attention of those at the bottom of the sales funnel who are ready to purchase.

78% of travel businesses decided to cut Paid Media spending post-pandemic, which may make you feel uneasy about investing in this channel. There is now a bigger opportunity to win with Paid Search as there are less competitors bidding on the same keywords. This means you can often find hidden gems of reasonably priced keywords that deliver extremely high quality and high intent users to your website.

What is PPC?

Let’s cover the basics. PPC typically begins with a paid advertising campaign that appears on websites or within sponsored search engine results when users search for specific keywords that you’ve decided to bid on with your Ads.

For example, if you’re looking for “Holidays to Ibiza”, you will see Sponsored results at the top of the feed for holidays to Ibiza. These are Paid Ads

When a user clicks on a Sponsored result and visits your website, a little bit of your Ad Budget is spent. The beauty of PPC is that you only pay when someone clicks on your Ad, meaning you are only targeting those interested in your services. Getting your target audience to click your Ad is the first step, hooking them with your unique selling proposition (USP) and your great user experience (UX) on your website is the next step (but we won’t dive into that too much here!).

To make your PPC work, you will need to create your targeted Ads with clear objectives, mind and measure your success against those objectives and understand what levers you have available to pull to help improve performance. This is where your digital marketing plan comes into play. This involves a strategic approach to ensure you are optimising your budget to its fullest potential.

But why should you include PPC in your travel marketing strategy?

PPC generates FAST results – whilst SEO is an effective (and, in theory, free) method of marketing, results can take months or years to really hit the bottomline.

While SEO should play a major part in your digital marketing strategy, your PPC campaigns appear almost immediately after launch, offering more agility inline with seasonal trends or flash offers.

Furthermore, every aspect of a Paid Media campaign is highly trackable, providing you with more actionable data on conversions, cost-per-click (CPC), engagement, and other essential metrics than most organic channels, which then allows you to refine your approach where necessary and maximise your ROI.

As a travel company wanting to promote your holiday packages, it’s important to ensure your campaigns align with your core messaging by carefully crafting your ad copy to resonate best with the key terms you’re bidding on. Having the power to seriously tailor your travel Ads with PPC means you standard a far better chance of engaging your target audiences as they’re more likely to click through when they see your highly relevant ad.

For example, you are more likely to see success when promoting and tailoring ‘Family Friendly Resort Holiday’ ads to those users that sit within the desired demographics of a parent. And with Google Ads you can place your Ads for these resorts under keywords such as ‘family-friendly holiday’, or ‘holidays for a family of 4’ and produce ad copy which emphasises your family deals under this particular campaign.

As you are paying for each click on your Ad, you want the clicks to be from ready to purchase users. Paid Search users are great leads because they have already shown an interest in the services and/or holidays you offer from the keywords they have typed into the search engine. This is why it’s important to put the effort into your keyword research. You may need to base your keyword structure on the destinations, hotels or holiday packages you commonly book for, but try to base each ad group around a theme. Research can be timely with the huge volume of searches being undertaken and the competitive nature of the travel industry, but with the right high-intent keywords, you will find leads that are ready to convert and purchase the holiday they have been dreaming about.