How We Drove a 120% Increase in Flight Bookings for a Travel Agency in 6 Months

This is a travel agency and before they came to us, they already spent bigger budget on google ads. As they have not got the expected results from it they started to think it as a competition problem they feel dominated by competitors.

But we have heard this before and in most of the cases its not platform problem, its campaign design and optimization problem.

We have audited the account first and what we see in the search terms report is overwhelming.

We saw that lots of irrelevant search terms like "flight status," "flight distance," "flight time are triggering the ads continuously and burned the ad budget badly.

When we look at the conversion tracking set up we saw inefficiency in purchase conversion tracking. Lots of duplicate conversion tracking were used which broke the algorithm. Most importantly the ad account got learned with bad data and so it is becoming tough to get good results from that ad account.

In keyword targeting we saw lots of broad match types used hence its triggering brand terms in route campaign. Don’t see any good ad group wise theming in the campaigns. As a result, all of these bad factors together made the account really badly optimized. And the client was thinking it’s a platform problem.

The campaigns were run on automated bidding strategies without having good conversion data. We feel sad when we see this type of conditions other agencies create for businesses.

At the first thorough audit we got that this account is impossible to use for good results. There will be only waste of time and budget if we work in that account. As experts we suggested the client to create a new ad account where we will rebuild the campaign strategies from scratch. Client gets agreed and we had started fresh.

We started with a route-wise keyword campaign targeting route pages at scale, covering almost 500 routes. Each route was treated as its own theme so the ad groups stayed tight and the message match between query, ad and landing page was clean.

The Brand campaign is solely focused on brand exact match terms. This is one of the simplest, most-skipped fundamentals in travel Google Ads. Mixing brand and non-brand into the same campaigns destroys reporting clarity and inflates non-brand performance with cheap branded conversions.

For 2 months we have optimized negative search terms and kept only the high intent keywords as per our intent matching strategy.

Once the data started looking healthy, we introduced RLSA campaigns as per our retargeting strategy with aggressive bidding on users who had already shown interest. And after having lots of of good optimization data started dynamic search ads to scale the brand to a next level.

In the 1st day itself we are out of reach from irrelevant searches as we have created account level negative list with those terms that bleeds ad budget.

After 3 month of optimization campaigns started giving cost per results at around Rs 300 per booking.

By the 6th month we achieved a benchmark of 120% rise against the base monthly sales volume. The disciplined optimization of same boring every week works and following a proper strategy shows the results. The client called and they said let’s double it down. We appreciated that.

The main thing we had seen and solved was removing low intent keywords completely from our funnel which never going to give money. The previous account was dead by bad algorithm learning so we change that which was never been thought by any other agencies for the brand.

Travel Google Ads at scale is won by intent discipline, clean account structure and a retargeting layer that converts the warm audience the prospecting campaigns have already paid for. That is the playbook. Done correctly, 120% growth on the same category that was previously too competitive is not surprising. It is the expected outcome.