Travel Agent PPC Agency

What is PPC Management for Travel Companies?

The act of creating and optimizing paid advertising campaigns for travel companies is known as travel agent PPC ads management. That is an incredibly simple explanation though, so let's dive a little deeper.

A paid advertising firm for travel agents often begins by getting to know you and your needs before providing expert PPC ads management. Since the way you approach paid advertising for a local area travel company is much different than how you would for a nationwide travel agent ecommerce brand, this information helps determine the next steps.

Local travel companies, for example, are often only searching for contact form submissions or calls. This can be accomplished through paid advertising that grows traffic to an optimized landing page or sales funnel. If those digital assets don't yet exist, or need substantial improvement, we recommend you start with Google Local Service Ads or Facebook Lead Forms.

Alternatively, ecommerce-focused travel companies are most often interested in online sales. Pay-per-click advertising can be used to boost traffic to an optimized product or category page. Google Shopping Campaigns might even make sense to include for some online businesses. Our sales funnels have also helped us to sell subscriptions, products, and services.

The next step in travel agent paid ads management is understanding the metrics that will be used to optimize and scale. For some travel companies, that means looking to platforms like Google Analytics. However, there are other options out there too, like Wicked Reports, Triple Whale, or Northbeam.

Your travel company should use a variety of advertising strategies and marketing tools to be successful with PPC advertising. Some of the best paid advertising services for travel companies include tactics to:

• Promote your digital assets (websites, sales funnels, etc.) via search engines, social media channels, and third parties.
• Increase conversions for your travel company through qualified leads or online sales.
• Better understand ad attribution through the integration of third-party attribution software.
• Showcase social proof through case studies, white papers, video testimonials, and other factors.
• Collect email addresses, create user-generated content, and nurture relationships.
• Place ad creatives across various ad placements and media formats to see which performs best.

Types of Paid Ads for Travel Companies

There are numerous ways to run paid advertising for your travel company. Let's discuss some of the most common PPC advertising being run for travel companies.

1.) Local Marketing

Nearby ads for your travel company can be run through nearly any advertising platform. One platform may be more effective for your local travel company than another. It is important to try out every available option to see which works best for your needs. Let's talk about a few nearby advertising choices.

There are going to be two options from Google.

In the first case, you can run traditional Google Ads, possibly using the newer Performance Max campaign type. With this ad campaign type, the Google algorithm can find the best combination of headlines, images, videos, and service locations to bring you customers. Performance Max campaigns are used frequently by accounting, legal, dental, and medical professionals. Even local stores use this campaign type.

The second option from Google, if you are in a qualifying business industry, is to check out their Local Service Ads. The Google Local Service Ads offers a pay-per-lead model, which means you get charged a flat fee for each lead the platform provides you. We often use Google Local Service Ads for home services contractors, like plumbers, electricians, roofers, and heating installers.

Facebook Ads can also be used to target people in the area. The first step is to set up a campaign with ad sets restricted to certain geographic areas. Local Area Facebook Ads are often used by travel companies of all types.

2.) Social Ads

Pretty much any online ad you see on a social network website is going to qualify as a social media ad.

The trick to social media marketing is keeping the ad creatives fresh. Without rotating ad creatives every few weeks, your campaign performance will slowly deteriorate. It might be necessary to look at weekly ad creative changes for campaigns with higher spending.

One of the best things about social ads is that you can target audiences who aren't yet aware of your product or service. When running search engine ads, that is quite the opposite since your ads are only going to show when someone is actively searching for what your travel company offers.

That benefit can also be a curse though, since conversion rates are often lower when people aren't closer in the revenue funnel of making an immediate purchase.

3.) Search Engine Advertising

You should invest in search advertising if you know people are searching online for your products or services.

Some people refer to this as travel agent Search Engine Marketing, or SEM. There are different ways to explain search ads (not to be confused with SEO), which are advertisements displayed on search engines' search results pages.

If you've been running search ads on Google for a while and have been successful at it, we suggest considering copying the campaigns over to the Bing Ads platform. As of an October 2022 study from StatCounter, about 3.57% of online users rely on Bing for their primary search engine.

4.) Display Ads

You'll find display ads on all kinds of message boards, chat rooms, game lounges, news websites (sometimes even local news stations), gossip websites, and more.

These are commonly used within the Google Ads and Bing Ads platforms.

To get started with display ads, you just need a set of ad creatives in different image sizes. It also helps to have a general idea of your target audience, but both ad platforms have their own algorithms that help you produce results from your ad spend.

5.) Retargeting Ads

Not everyone is going to convert during their first experience with your travel company website, landing page, or sales funnel.

It is almost always recommended to set up retargeting ads to help bring people back to your website after they've had time to think through different options.

You can run retargeting ads on any ad platform, too.

6.) Shopping Ads

This type of search ad was popularized by Google Shopping Campaigns.

To get started with Google Shopping, you just need an ecommerce website, a product feed (CSV or TXT), a Google Merchant Center account, and a Google Ads account for your travel company.

With these tools in place, you'll be able to provide Google Ads an updated list of all your accurate product data, including the title, SKU, image, price, and availability. From there, they will be able to find the right types of search queries to display your products at the top of the search results page.

7.) Video Ads

You can run video ads on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and other social networking websites.

If you are interested in running YouTube Ads, you'll just need to set up a video ads campaign in Google Ads.

To run video ads in Facebook or Instagram, you'll need a working Facebook Ads account.

Both ad platforms offer excellent conversion opportunities with video ads. We frequently use video ads to showcase product launches, custom services, personal introductions, and more!

If you have the budget to support ad creatives in video format, look to implement them into your paid advertising campaigns.

Tips for Managing Paid Ads for Travel Agents

We are a team of paid advertising professionals with extensive knowledge in the latest PPC trends for travel companies and other industries.

Here are some of our best tips to follow for keyword research, audience research, landing page / sales funnel optimization, conversion rate optimization, and ad creation.

1.) Keyword Research Tips

In the context of paid advertising, keyword research for travel agents largely relates to Google Ads and Bing Ads search campaigns. After all, Bing and Google only show ads based on what people search for that your travel company is targeting.

For example, a person searching for a travel company nearby might search "local travel agent" on a search engine. Knowing to target that exact phrase wouldn't require in-depth keyword research.

However, what if that exact match keyword wasn't producing enough search volume and the travel company needed to increase their advertising reach? Researching keywords would be necessary for the solution.

Typically, the paid advertising manager will discuss with the travel company about what types of products / services to target more often. A broader keyword targeting plan than exact matches might also be necessary.

For instance, the PPC manager might discover high search volume for "nearby travel companies" or even "travel agent services." The first phrase is targeting a type of business or organization in the area. The second phrase is targeting a service, which might result in a more lucrative conversion.

Negative keyword lists can also benefit from keyword research. You can use negative keywords to prevent your paid ads from showing in search queries that you know won't convert to more clients.

For example, an individual searching for "free services from travel companies" or "when to advertise to travel agents" is unlikely to convert. However, they might see your paid advertising if you are using broad keyword targeting without any negative keywords like "free" or "advertise".

As you can see, no matter how obvious your keyword research needs might be at the start of building out your campaign, they become more complicated as you begin to scale your ads and reduce wasted ad spend.

2.) Audience Research Tips

For travel company PPC advertising campaigns, audience research is often discussed in the context of scaling social ads. Google Ads and Bing Ads also offer audience targeting options.

We'll review some audience research and targeting history within Facebook Ads.

In years past, travel agent-focused paid ads managers relied heavily on building out their own custom audiences within Facebook. After all, one of the most attractive features of the Facebook Ads platform was the data it collected on its users, which travel agents lined up to exploit.

As time went on, data privacy and machine learning both had an impact on custom audiences.

Apple's iOS 14.5 update included a pop-up message that lets users opt out of personalized ad tracking. As a result, Facebook had difficulty tracking mobile device behavior. Even ad attribution reporting was affected.

Then came improvements to their machine learning algorithms, which greatly diminished the need for custom audiences and lookalike audiences for most ad companies for travel agents. Their algorithm has become so good at understanding your ideal audience that you typically do more harm than good by choosing your own interest-based targeting.

While there will still be plenty of travel company paid advertising agencies relying on custom audiences, the trend is moving toward broad targeting. You can see it in every update within Facebook Ads Manager as they slowly remove interest-based targeting options, or push for "Advantage Detailed Targeting."

This blog article from Social Media Examiner does a good job of talking about recent changes to audience targeting, if you'd like a second opinion.

This isn't to say audience research and targeting is going away. There will always be targeting options that can be manipulated within travel agent ad campaigns to squeeze a little extra performance.

3.) Landing Page Optimization Tips

The quality of your landing page will be a big factor in the success of your travel company paid advertising campaigns.

When we take on the management of a PPC advertising campaign for travel agents, we start by looking over the landing pages to see if they follow best practices. Here are some of the factors we look for in this review:

• Is there a benefit-focused headline?
• Are there any images above the fold?
• Is the content written in a compelling manner?
• Am I able to find a lead form right away?
• Are the call to actions easily noticeable?
• Does the page load quickly?
• Is there social proof?
• Am I able to load the page on a mobile device?

There are so many factors that come into the design and development of a quality landing page. Here is a great blog article about what makes a results-driven landing page.

Please, don't spend money on paid advertising until you have a landing page that follows best practices! Ideally, you should never consider your landing page to be finished. Try running A/B testing every few months to continue refining your sales pitch.

4.) Sales Funnel Tips

As an alternative to a landing page, you might want to consider building out one or more sales funnels. We rely heavily on sales funnels for lead generation, email audience building, and even online purchases.

For example, we have a client that promotes an online fitness challenge that you could even join from your local area. While managing their digital marketing we built multiple sales funnels within Click Funnels. Here are some of the funnels we made:

• We used squeeze pages to help capture email addresses while building awareness for the program.
• We used lead magnets to provide people with healthy eating tips, fitness tips, webinars, and sneak peaks in exchange for an email address.
• We used application funnels to push people toward the idea of wanting to apply to participate in exclusive programs.
• We used sales letter funnels to serve as the registration system for the online program.

There are many different types of funnels, so your travel company isn't limited to only these options. Just keep in mind these can be incredibly helpful for gauging interest in a product or service, building out an email subscriber base, and selling a product or service online.

5.) Conversion Optimization Tips

Having a clear understanding of your conversion rate is critical to making informed advertising decisions. The average conversion rate is between 1-3%, but that varies greatly between industries, products, and services.

Let's run through a basic scenario to help illustrate the impact of conversion rates.

1. You sell a $100 product or service on your site.
2. You have a 1% conversion rate, meaning for every 100 people who visit your website you sell 1 product or service.
3. You have a $1.00 average cost per click (CPC), meaning for each person who visits your website you spend $1.00.
4. To sell 1 product or service, you need 100 clicks from paid advertising, which would cost you $100. This is known as your cost per acquisition (CPA).
5. Your return on ad spend (ROAS) would be 1x, meaning for every dollar spent in PPC advertising you get one dollar in return.

For most travel companies, this return on ad spend wouldn't be acceptable. Sadly, we often see this type of ROAS when jumping into new client accounts.

To improve the situation, you hire a paid advertising firm to modify your campaign settings, ad creatives, and landing page experience.

Let's assume those improvements bring your conversion rate up from 1% to 2%. That means for every 100 visits to your website you now sell 2 products. This is twice the return on ad spend! You might be profitable now selling that product or service, if your margins are good.

Understanding your conversion rate, and knowing how to improve it, can be crucial to the management of your PPC advertising.

6.) Ad Creation Tips

This is potentially one of the most important aspects of a Facebook Ads account, but it also applies to Google Display Ads.

When you run Facebook Ads or Instagram Ads for travel agents, you are mostly targeting a cold audience that is more interested in quickly scrolling by advertisements in favor of seeing what their friends and family are up to online.

You should develop an understanding of how to capture someone's attention in a split second.

To do this, you need to build out good looking ad creatives that make someone stop for a second and say to themselves, "wait a second, what...?"

This doesn't happen by running the same ad creative over and over and over again. Even if it is a good ad, it will eventually become stale. You should change things up frequently, even if you are just targeting people nearby.

If you don't change out your ad creatives and test new ideas, you'll suffer from what is called "ad fatigue." This is the state in which your target audience has already seen your ad so many times that they instinctively scroll by it without ever interacting with your brand.

Don't be caught in this situation. You should understand when to pause an ad because it isn't performing as well as it once did. You should understand when to test new ideas, especially if you are emotionally attached to an ad that you spent a lot of time making.

Why Choose WebCitz to Manage Your PPC Tactics

We want to be the PPC advertising partner of your travel company! As a comprehensive paid ads management agency helping travel agents, we have multiple internal teams focused on search engine marketing, social media ads, sales funnel development, and ad creative testing. In most travel agent-focused PPC agencies, only one person handles all tasks, but this is not the case for us! You might not get the results you want from travel company paid ads agencies if you don't test campaign optimization and innovative ideas often enough.

Choosing a paid ad firm for your travel company is not an easy task. With more than 20 years of experience, you know you can trust the PPC tactics and plans we suggest for your travel company. These are often the same paid ads tactics we use for our own lead generation.

More importantly, you should choose our paid advertising agency because you feel confident we are the right team to help your travel company grow. Consider our paid ads experts for the following reasons:

• Having been in business since 2004, we have more than 20 years of experience.
• Our paid advertising help us rank for keywords we don't yet rank organically for.
• We do not outsource digital advertising packages for our travel company clients, including paid ads management, sales funnel development, or ad creative services since we have our own internal advertising team.
• If you call us during normal business hours, you will likely get an answer from one of our teammates within a few rings.

Let's discuss what our PPC professionals can offer your travel company! Travel agent-related small businesses often hire us for PPC advertising management plans, but larger travel companies can also hire us to augment their marketing departments.

Our team would appreciate the opportunity to be considered when your travel company needs a PPC marketing agency. We would be happy to talk to you about your follow-up questions via email or phone if you have any.

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