Pay Per Click Campaigns for Travel Businesses
Travel businesses rely heavily on pay per click campaigns and paid social boosting to reach targeted travel consumers.
It’s hard to beat the placement and reach of online advertising. It’s extremely fast and powerful, yet it’s competitive. The required minimum bids will shock you.
Before you spend big money on travel PPC campaign management, it’s essential you have a strong understanding of your target audience and have stellar content with a laser clear UVP to present to them.
Otherwise, your ppc spend could down the proverbial drain. Being cautious, stingy, and doubtful at first is actually wise!
As this chart above from Statista depicts, 300+ billion dollars will be spent on digital advertising this year with a 30% yearly growth expected. Unfortunately, most of it will be wasted spend due to poor ad strategy, weak preparation, cheesy content/ads, and mistargeted ads on the wrong platforms.
For small travel businesses, bad ads and poor targeting means you get to spend all over again. Big ad companies get rich on that. You can pay them, or pay a ppc strategist to help keep your money and get customers.
Ad Strategy to Attract, Engage and Convert Relevant Customers
It’s not just a matter of reaching consumers at the top of Google’s search results or in social media ad spaces. Visibility doesn’t mean automatic attention, clicks and sales conversions. Most business owners learn this the hard way. Digital advertising is heavily laden with scams, including spam clicks.
And regardless of how visitors arrive at your site or even how interested and motivated they are upon arrival, your content has to convert them to subscribe, purchase a travel package or contact you.
PPC campaigns are very sales transaction oriented. No one wants to spend thousands of dollars, unless they get some substantial sales activity right away. And for good reason, many visitors window shop out of curiosity with no substantial intent to purchase.
Avoiding clicks from window shoppers is also part of successful ad design, copywriting and campaign success.
Ads need to be very specific, focused on those most intense drivers of buying travel experiences. For instance, if you sell Italy vacation packages, then it’s often better to drill down to those cities/regions that are likely to convert (e.g., Rome, Venice, Amalfi Coast) and offer benefits/features that appeal specifically to them.
A general ad catches a lot of attention, but do you have the content and the power to convert them? Could you compete head on using general travel keywords up against Expedia, Viator, Disney Cruises or Gadventures in your ads?
Optimizing your ad (Google Adscore) is a helpful thing, however that won’t be enough to create sales success. And often, Google doesn’t lower your bid price even with a stellar Adscore. You’ll have many of your pay per click advertising myths exploded as you conduct your campaigns.
It’s better to accept that PPC campaigns are competitive, prices are high, and expertise/strategy is needed to win at this. From targeting only the right prospects, choosing the right keywords, testing campaigns, and discovering what the winning mix of ad text and landing pages is.
6 Reasons for PPC Campaign Failure
It’s good to know why it might fail. This way you deal with the issue up front.
1. insufficient budget to test, learn and optimize — learning is going to be part of this
2. poor knowledge of target consumer — wrong offer
3. wrong conversion metrics — finding those metrics that define your real ideal visitor
4. wrong keywords — too general or not on topic
5. wrong landing page content — weak content with weak copy doesn’t impact, engage or retain
6. not building in deterrents for poorly qualified viewers — so they don’t click
Your Travel PPC campaign begins with planning and strategy, good execution, and ongoing optimization to trim poor performing ads and audiences. Here’s a breakdown of the key steps:
1. Define your Campaign Goals: What do you want to achieve? Awareness of company, expose your travel packages and tours, communicate brand messages, discover target market interest and tastes, capture emails and subscribers, generate leads, or create sales? Your ads and landing pages will be shaped accordingly.
2. Crystalize your Offer: What tangible, significant benefits are you going to offer your audience that will get them to pay attention, click and buy?
3. Decide on the Best Advertising Platform: Consider Google Ads, Google Adsense network, YouTube Ads, ADroll, Bing Ads, social media platforms (TikTok, Instagram/Facebook Ads, etc.) depending on your target audience and goals. All together they provide deep and broad access to a massive travel audience.
4. Keyword Research: Research and specific a range of relevant keywords travelers use to search for travel experiences.
5. Performance Analytics: Ensure you have high quality ad/content performance and conversion tracking enabled. The goal is to discover the best performing ad/content combinations which give you the results you’re wanting.
6. Write your Unique Ads: Create attention-getting, impactful, and engaging text ads that stand out and make a differentiated message from other advertisers and appeal only to your targeted audience.
7. Create your Landing Pages: create very specific landings pages for each of your keyword groupings to make them ultra-relevant to travelers so they get the best experience, trust, comfort and motivation to buy from you.
8. Set a budget: Determine how much you’re willing to spend per day or total on the campaign and how this will be distributed across your keywords and campaigns.
As part of your travel marketing service package, PPC campaigns will be included for free for most normal budgets. However, this does not apply to a mega-sized automated campaign where you may need a ppc specialist firm.
Your PPC campaigns are a great source of information regarding which keywords and topics generate the most leads. That helps with content planning and organic keyword strategy.
Take a moment right now to review my travel marketing packages which are an exceptional value. In fact, I include PPC campaign management at no extra cost. No need to hire a big agency. Save your money and hire me.
Contact Gord at 416 998 6246.
