Services / Paid & performance
Buy the traveller once.
Paid works in travel when it's measured against a booking, not a click. That means the tracking has to be right before a single pound goes anywhere.
Paid media for a tour operator should be judged on cost per closed booking, not cost per click. That requires conversion tracking that survives an audit, campaigns built on high-intent destination and tour queries, brand-term defence against OTAs bidding on your name, and landing pages built by the same team writing the ads.
The problem
Why this usually isn't working
Two things go wrong with paid media in travel. The first is that the tracking was never right, so the reported cost per conversion counts form-opens and WhatsApp clicks alongside actual bookings, and nobody notices for a year.
The second is that the OTAs are bidding on your brand name. A traveller who has already decided to book with you searches your company, clicks a Viator ad at the top, and books the same tour with a third of the value stripped out. You paid for that customer twice and lost them anyway.
Neither problem is solved by a bigger budget. Both are solved by fixing measurement first and structure second.
If your reported cost per conversion counts WhatsApp clicks, you don't have a cost per conversion.
What's included
Six things you actually get
How we run it
Four stages, every engagement.
Who this is for
Built for these situations.
Questions
Before you ask.
What budget do we need to start?
It depends on your average booking value and your market, and we'd rather look at those than quote a number here. What we will say: below a certain spend the management overhead outweighs the return, and we'll tell you if you're under it.
Do you charge a percentage of ad spend?
We prefer not to. Percentage-of-spend quietly rewards an agency for spending more of your money, which is the wrong incentive in a seasonal business.
Can you fix our existing Google Ads account?
Often yes. We audit first — sometimes a restructure is right, sometimes the account is sound and the problem is the landing page or the tracking.
Should we bid on our own brand name?
Usually yes, if OTAs or resellers are bidding on it. It feels like paying for traffic you'd get free, but the alternative is paying a 30% commission on the same booking.
How do you measure a booking that closes over WhatsApp?
With enquiry-to-booking attribution. The enquiry is tracked as a conversion, and the close is fed back from your CRM — which is one reason we care what CRM you run.
Related
The other five services.
Start here
The audit is free. The findings are yours.
Send us your site and you'll get a written assessment — including where this service would and wouldn't help you. We'd rather tell you that now than three months into a retainer.