If you’re a tour operator who’s spending money on paid search campaigns, your goal will obviously be to increase the return on your investment.

Here are some tips from PPC experts at Wordstream on how you can optimise your Adwords PPC campaigns by reducing waste.

1. Take a balanced approach

WordStream identified three approaches you can take to your PPC campaign management:

Aggressive

With this approach, you’re trying to drive as many leads or clicks as possible, without worrying about spend. You care more about the position your ad is in (ie. rank) rather than ROI.

Conservative

With a conservative approach, you have a specific budget that you don’t want to increase, and you’re happy with a specific amount of leads or clicks by day. The trouble is your ad’s position is easily affected by your competitors.

Balanced

This is your sweet spot. You’re trying to stay within a certain cost per conversion or cost per click, and you do this by raising and lowering bids if they will push you closer to that target. You should be willing to spend more if it stays within your target.

2. Make Adjustments to Keywords

How you bid on your keywords is integral to saving money on your PPC campaigns (provided you have picked the right ones in the first place). First of all, with keyword selection make sure you pay more for exact match & phrase match keywords than broad match keywords, because broad match terms are the least qualified.

Log in every day and add negative keywords if you notice you’re getting traffic for irrelevant search terms. You really don’t want to be paying for those!

For example, if you’re bidding on “foodie tours sydney” as a broad match term, your ad may show up for people searching “food tours melbourne”. If you don’t operate in Melbourne, you definitely want to make sure you have excluded it.

When to raise bids

If you have have wiggle room in your cost per action, then it’s time to raise your bids.

This will result in more impressions. Google will then show your ads more frequently, and you will have a higher chance of having a higher ad position, resulting in more clicks.

Overall, this means you will have more conversions, but at a higher cost per conversion.

When to lower bids

If you have keywords with a low quality score (<5) or if your keywords have poor ROI, then lower the bids for those keywords.

This will result in less impressions, because Google will show ad less frequently, and also less clicks, since your ad will be placed in a lower position.

Overall, this means you will get fewer conversions, but at a lower cost per conversion.

3. Try to increase your quality score

The reason you want to increase your quality score is because you will end up paying less for a higher position the higher your quality score is.

According to Google, the factors that impact your score are:

• Click-through rates
• Search query to ad to keyword relevance
• Your landing page (ie. the destination URL of your ad)
• Historical performance of the whole account
• Geographic performance
• “Other” (aka Google’s secret sauce)

If you have tried your best on all fronts, then you should probably focus on your landing page quality. Focus on being relevant, transparent, and easily navigable:

Relevance

• Is your landing page directly relevant to your ad text and keyword? Send them to a specific product catalog or product page instead of just your home page.
• Provide detailed and useful information about whatever is being advertised.
• Add a FAQs section to each product description.
• Add reviews (ie. quotes) that show real opinions.
• Use photos of people on your tour.

Transparency

• Have your contact details on the page, easy to see.
• Clearly state what your business does.
• Have a privacy policy.

Easy navigation

• Don’t make people hunt for info they may need. Put everything about what they need, FAQs, and tour itinerary on your product page.
• Make it quick and easy for people to ask for more information by providing contact details.
• Try to make it so that people can easily learn more about your product.
• Eliminate unnecessary steps before reaching an action you want them to take (ie. booking!). If there’s an extra hurdle to jump through (eg. they have to email and wait or call you to confirm availability and make a payment)  they will leave your site.

If you are currently incapable of taking real-time bookings on your website, take a free trial of our booking software. It will manage your availability across multiple channels so that you have the most revenue while making sure that you are never overbooked.