Travel PPC Strategies to Grow Ecommerce, Lead Generation & ROAS

In today’s AI-driven world of PPC advertising, travel agency PPC strategies such as seasonal budgets, ad extensions, and A/B testing that have previously driven your ecommerce, lead generation, and return on ad spend (ROAS) growth may not necessarily remain as effective. So, to help you assess your travel PPC strategy for success in 2025 and beyond, let’s ask three questions…

1. Is Your Travel PPC Strategy Scalable?

With over 190 countries in the world and countless types of holidays, the most successful travel PPC strategies must be able to operate at a large scale, and it must be able to easily upscale. In the past, an ability to create a campaign quickly when needed might have been enough, but in an impending AI-first world we must instead consider how best to keep PPC campaigns running for as long as possible so that it can get as much data as possible for the ad AI to learn from, and not be forced in and out of periods of learning by being turned off and on again as the seasons come and go.

A scalable PPC strategy for the travel sector might include campaigns for:

• Travel products that correspond to rising travel trends of the year, such as the meteoric growth in market demand for adventure travel.
• Travel products that correspond to landing pages which are both among those with the highest traffic on the website and have high conversion rates or generate the most revenue.

This way, you have evergreen campaigns that you can keep relevant throughout the year by creating and pausing ad groups within the campaigns, and you can prioritise the majority of your ad budget and time spent managing and optimising your ad campaigns to:

• Capitalise on increases in demand as a result of sector trends.
• Maximise the number of conversions you get for your ad spend.

And thereby grow your holiday enquiries, bookings and return on ad spend (ROAS).

2. Is Your Travel PPC Budget Focused?

An overview of seasonal search volume trends for searches around holidays and destinations shows that search interest is higher in the first half of the year than in the second half of the year, and those involving long haul travel have higher search interest in the first 3-4 months of the year than in the rest of the year. While people who look for deals on holiday components which frequently fluctuate in price – like flights and accommodation – may research midweek and over early mornings, experience tells you that people’s thoughts turn to leisure and holiday planning on weekday evenings and weekends.

Also, it’s the people who have not booked with you before whom you want to reach the most, helping to grow your overall PPC return on ad spend in the long term. Be wary of AI spending the majority of budget on what costs less to advertise to and more easily meets your simple targets of bookings and revenue, namely returning customers, and achieving little visibility for the potential new customers out there who are not searching for your brand.

A top travel PPC strategy should:

• Have a budget plan focused on the periods in the year when search interest is highest.
• If budget is limited, test running ads only on the times of day and days of week when people are most likely to be holiday planning
• Consider the impact of AI-driven bid strategies on new customer acquisition

This way, you give yourself the best chance of maximising your visibility at those times and increasing your opportunities to get holiday enquiries and bookings.

3. Is Your Travel PPC Strategy Audience-Led?

Travel keyword research also shows that search terms with significant search volume are mostly destination-based, that is to say, quite generic. This makes it extremely important to make sure that Google is given the most information possible to understand who your audience is, and that will differ depending on the holiday type.

An audience-led PPC strategy might:

• Advertise different holiday types to the appropriate audiences by having different ad groups designed to capture the same destination-based search terms but targeted to different audiences.
• Write different ad copy to promote the different holiday types but always staying specific to the searched for destination.

Your range of holiday types may be huge, so here is where the focus you set in order to easily scale up your strategy helps, as it allows you to:

• Reserve the majority of your time to crafting more personalised ads for the destination and holiday types which you plan to focus on
• Capture search interest for the remaining destinations with generic ads without limiting the potential of your travel PPC strategy to grow your holiday enquiries, bookings and return on ad spend

Next Steps for Your Travel PPC Strategy

If you’d like to learn more about how our travel PPC agency experts can help you in crafting your travel PPC strategy, please get in touch to arrange a free consultation.