Working in the tourism and hospitality industry has always been a challenge, but 2020 was a particularly different year. When the world started to go into lockdown following the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, flights were grounded, resorts and amusement parks closed, and hotels and other vacation accommodation shut their doors. Governments urged citizens to stay at home and to only travel for essential reasons.
Unsurprisingly, this had a catastrophic impact on the tourism and hospitality industry. According to The World Tourism Organization, as many as 100 million direct tourism jobs have been put at risk due to the pandemic and tourism could reduce globally by 20-30%, resulting in losses of around $50 billion.
One of the major challenges for anyone working with Google Ads in the tourism and hospitality industry was that this was a completely unprecedented situation. Nobody knew how to deal with advertising in a pandemic, especially one that had a direct impact on the industry.
There was a lack of clarity and no consensus on a global basis. Each country was dealing with the situation slightly differently. There was a lot of information for advertisers to digest and it was tough to know what steps to take.
The uncertainty over how long stay-at-home orders would remain in place meant that nobody was searching for and booking tickets and travel. Consumers were unable to make short-term bookings and were hesitant to make long-term plans. Many had limited funds to make these purchases.
As a result, CTRs and conversion rates dropped, while metrics such as CPC and CPA soared. Tourism and hospitality advertisers and Google Ads account managers who had previously been running hugely successful campaigns, were suddenly struggling to meet their goals. Companies cut budgets and had to change their focus. That’s why our promo that offers our Google Ads optimization tool at zero cost until October 2021, can be so useful to businesses in this industry (more about that later).
While many of us expected to be out the other side by now, uncertainty continues to linger. Consumer behaviour has changed, with many expecting to stay local rather than travel abroad and making decisions at the right minute. Your Google Ads campaigns need to take into account the new circumstance.
There is no playbook for how to run Google Ads during a pandemic. But everyone is in the same boat (fortunately nobody was literally in a boat) and has to learn as they go along.
While there is no one-size-fits-all way to optimize your campaigns, you need to continue to test new approaches if you want to succeed. It might be tempting to pause your campaigns and strip back your budget, but Google has this advice: “You can still be there for your customers by adapting your approach and marketing objectives.”
Google also recommends that you:
If you’re wondering how to put Google’s advice into practice, read on. While previously you might have invested in campaigns that target customers who are ready to book a holiday, now you could aim to:
If you want to run successful campaigns during the Covid-19 pandemic, it’s important to be agile. While consumers have started booking travel and tickets for events, restrictions change all the time. You need to update your campaigns accordingly.
OrbitalAds can help you act faster by automating manual and operational tasks, which frees up your time to focus on more strategic aspects of your Google Ads campaigns. This means you can differentiate your campaigns and get ahead of your competition.
It’s also super important to stay up-to-date on search trends in this rapidly changing world and to make the most of every dollar of your budget. You can’t afford to have budget leaks, not optimize or add negative keywords, or continue to run underperforming campaigns.
OrbitalAds helps improve and optimize Google Ads campaigns performance by giving you laser-level detail in terms of:
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