AdWords Tips For Tourism Businesses
Our Client Strategy & Marketing Team loves AdWords. Like really, really loves AdWords. So much so, that they recently took things to the next level and became Certified Google Partners. This means they’re officially recognized by Google as AdWords experts, having proven they have the experience and know-how to advise on successful marketing campaigns for tourism businesses.
Need help reaching AdWords nirvana? Our experts are offering their favorite tips and tricks. Let’s dive in:
Putting time and work into your website to make it attractive, readable, and navigable is one of the best things you can do to improve conversions and rank better on search.
Many business owners want to jump into paid advertising, but it’s more vital that your website has a great user experience first before you move on to advertising. If it’s too difficult to find info or even the ‘Book Now’ button on your website, then 70% or more of your visitors will bounce off even if you brought qualified people to your site who might have been a good candidate to buy!
Work on having a quality, mobile-optimized website first, then launch targeted and retargeted paid advertising campaigns to receive qualified leads who will be ready to buy when they land on your site!
– Jenny Hadden, Lead Marketing Analytics Associate, Client Strategy & Marketing Team
When starting your first AdWords campaign, it’s important to choose relevant and specific keywords. One of the most helpful tricks I have learned, is to keep this table in my back pocket when creating AdWords campaigns. The table describes the modifiers you can add to keywords to increase your reach or make your keywords more specific.
I recommend that clients start specific so that they can ensure their ads are relevant to the search terms potential customers are looking for. After data is gained about these specific keywords, you can broaden your search terms and continue testing. It’s important to track how your keywords are doing and make changes appropriately.
Ali Gourley, Project Coordinator, Client Strategy & Marketing Team
Tip #1 – Utilize Ad Extensions
When advertising on the Google Search Network be sure to utilize Ad Extensions to increase click-through rate and in many cases ROI.
Here’s a tid bit from Google about this:
If two competing ads have the same bid and quality, the ad with greater expected impact from extensions will generally appear in a higher ad position than the other.
For the tourism industry, particularly effective ad extensions include location extensions, review extensions, site link extensions, and callout extensions. (All image examples below are from Google).
Location Extension
Review Extension
Sitelink Extension
Callout Extension
Ad extensions can be included at no extra cost to the advertiser. You are charged the same cpc for extension clicks as if someone were to click on the headline of your ad with no extensions.
Tip #2 – Utilize Bid Adjustments
Taking advantage of your analytics data and leveraging bid adjustments is a great way to increase ROI. Bid adjustments allow you to show your ad more or less often depending on when visitors are likely to convert.
Bid adjustments can be set for dimensions like time of day, device type, or geographic location. Google recommends starting with bid adjustments around +25% of the max cost per click, however each advertiser will need to evaluate their own budget to determine what bid adjustment is appropriate.
– Charlie Dunn, Project Coordinator, Client Strategy & Marketing Team
