In this Tourism Marketing Quick Tip:
Find out about search impression share and how watching that crucial metric in Google ads can help maximize your revenue
What is Search Impression Share?
Impression share (IS) is the percentage of impressions that your ads receive compared to the total number of impressions that your ads could get. Impression share = impressions / total eligible impressions.
Example
Imagine it’s the early part of the season, and people are looking for boat tours. 90% of the people searching are seeing your ad. But maybe you are busy, and you don’t log in, and you log in later in June, and your search impression share is only 30%. This means that only 1 in 3 people searching for boat tours are even seeing your ad.
If that is the case, but your ad campaigns are performing well, and you have available capacity on your tours, you probably want to triple your daily budget to be able to capture 90-100% of your ad spend. This will vary seasonally and can move around a lot according to weather factors, events, and things going on in town.
If you are running a profitable campaign – you will probably want your ads to be showing 100% of the time. Make sure your budgets are set high enough to be able to capture all of that demand.
Google offers data and tools that look at historical seasonality and will give you tips to see when spikes in demand are increasing and will recommend increasing your budget to capture additional demand.
Maximize Direct Bookings to Your Website
We often see companies that are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in commissions to OTAs at 25% or higher, while their own search advertising campaigns are operating at a much lower cost of acquisition and are capped at 50% or sometimes even 10% search impression. Even if they are running at full capacity it would be easy for them to expand the direct marketing channel and slow down the availability that they are providing OTAS to increase margins and grow your direct bookings.
Find more helpful tips about Google Ad Campaigns and advertising for tours, activities, and attractions by visiting our Advertising Resource Library. Find the specific advertising topic you are looking for.
Looking for fast, actionable tourism marketing insights? Follow along with our Tourism Marketing Quick Tip Video Series here.
