Buy direct bookings on purpose.
Google Search for high-intent queries, Performance Max for destination targeting, Meta retargeting and lookalikes for site visitors who didn't book, all wired through proper conversion tracking so every dollar is attributable. Ad accounts stay in your name. We manage; you own.
The structural reason this isn't optional.
Default ad-platform settings assume a 1-day consideration window. Tour operators have a 14-day median consideration window, sometimes longer. Last-click attribution under-credits top-of-funnel by 40–60%, and pauses the very campaigns that drive week-2 bookings. Most operators who 'tried Google Ads and it didn't work' tried it on default settings and watched the algorithm shut down their best work.
Brand-search defensive bidding is the highest-ROI move in tour operator paid media, and most operators don't run it. Viator and GetYourGuide bid on your tour name. People searching for you click their ad, book through them, and you pay 25–30% commission on a customer who was already coming to your site. Defensive brand bidding for $3–8/day usually recovers $5K–25K/yr. We turn it on in week one.
We never take a percentage of ad spend. The conventional agency model, 10–20% of spend, pays the agency more when you spend more, regardless of whether bookings actually grew. That's the structural misalignment. Flat retainer means when the right call is 'cut spend by 30% and rebuild creative,' we recommend it without losing money on it.
What ships, concretely.
High-intent destination + tour queries ('book Cancun tour,' 'Tulum tour deals,' 'Iceland Northern Lights pickup'). Tight match types, negative keyword sweeps weekly, manual bid strategy until conversion volume justifies smart bidding.
Destination targeting with proper exclusions (we exclude OTA branded searches, irrelevant verticals, and competitor brands by default). Asset groups built around your strongest tours, not auto-generated junk.
$3–8/day on your own tour name to outrank Viator and GYG ads. Recovers brand-search clicks that would otherwise route to OTA-commission bookings. Live in week one.
Site visitors who didn't book, segmented by page depth, time on site, and tour viewed. Creative refreshed every 4–6 weeks to avoid fatigue. Budget calibrated to your retargeting pool size.
Lookalikes built off past customer email lists (when available) and high-intent site visitors. We test 1%, 3%, 5% lookalikes side-by-side and scale the winner.
GTM, server-side container, conversion API for both Google and Meta. Booking events fire on confirmed bookings (not just landing-page reaches). Attribution actually works.
Search + PMax, configured for the 14-day window, not the 1-day default.
Most tour operator Google Ads accounts we audit are set to optimize for 1-day click attribution. Tour buying takes 14 days median. We rebuild attribution windows, conversion lookback, and bid strategy around the actual buying behavior of your customers, and the algorithm starts spending on the right things.
Retargeting and lookalikes built off real signals, not the boost button.
Meta is where you re-engage the 70% of site visitors who didn't book on the first visit. The 'boost post' button is not a strategy, proper retargeting is. We segment audiences by behavior, refresh creative on a calendar, and scale only what's measurably working in attribution-correct reporting.
Server-side, attribution-correct, no PMax black box.
Default GA4 + GTM browser-side tracking is increasingly broken, iOS opt-outs, Safari ITP, ad blockers. We deploy server-side tracking via GTM server containers, hooked into both Google's Conversion API and Meta's CAPI. Booking events fire when a booking is confirmed in your booking system, not when a button is clicked. The dashboard tells the truth.
The single highest-ROI move in tour-operator paid media.
Viator and GYG bid on your tour name. Searchers click their ad, book through them, you pay 25–30% commission. We outbid them on your own brand for $3–8/day. Recovery is usually 5–15% of branded direct revenue, paid for by the savings on commissions you would otherwise have lost.
Pick the tier this lives in.
Let's find out exactly how much money your broken booking funnel is costing you.
Drop your details. We look under the hood of your booking system, OTA mix, ad accounts, and tracking, and send a written audit doc within 48 hours showing exactly where you're losing money. 100% free. Zero obligation. Tour operators only.
About 1 in 5 audits ends with us telling the operator “you don't need us yet”, and we send the audit doc anyway. That's by design.
