Tours and Activities Ads passport to performance for GetYourGuide

“It was a really easy decision to add Tours and Activities Ads to our portfolio—because it’s an opportunity for our marketing team to take ownership of feeds, experiment, and roll out new things,” says GetYourGuide’s Senior Paid Search Marketing Manager, David McNair. “Whenever someone is looking to book an unforgettable experience, we need to make sure that we’re the first one in front of them, with the right creative at the right time. We want to test everything when it comes to doing that—and we always strive to be one step ahead of new products on the platform side. Search is becoming much more image-based and using these kinds of richer formats is a muscle we want to train.”

David joined GetYourGuide with a mission to help ensure travellers can find unforgettable travel experiences through paid search channels. His brief is to grow the contribution of Microsoft Advertising’s revenue contribution while consistently hitting targets for return on advertising spend (ROAS). That puts real value on opportunities to differentiate GetYourGuide’s experiences from the other attractions in search results—and that’s exactly what Tours and Activities Ads provide.

“We can see how effective this format is at differentiating GetYourGuide from the ten or so blue links that appear on the results page,” says David. “We’re able to communicate much more of the feel of the experience and what we can provide. When we’re promoting a food tour in Berlin, it’s no longer just a headline that we’re showing people—it’s a picture of a today's traveller trying local street food in a hip and well-known area of the city (maybe a döner!). We can test how these different images resonate with audiences. There’s just so much more we can experiment with.”

Delivering travel experiences within results pages has had an immediate impact on traffic volumes and revenue generated. It’s an impact that’s been growing further as David and his team continue to test and experiment.

“The impact on traffic was immediate, and we started catching all of this demand straight away,” says David. “We started off with a relatively simple campaign, using mainstream keywords, and catching upper-funnel traffic—and now we’re getting more granular, exploring long-tail keywords, and setting different bids for performance-based segments so that we can keep focusing on our sweet spot for ROAS. One of the important things that we learned early on was taking advantage of all the fields available within Tours and Activities Ads—like free cancellation and activity duration. Getting all of those ticked off and included in the ads really helped.”

Tours and Activities Ads don’t just enable David to provide more inspiration and information to searchers. They also provide him with more conversions at a lower cost. The ad format uncovered entirely new traffic for GetYourGuide, as 98% of clicks and 96% of conversions brought in by Tours and Activities Ads came from pages that didn’t have any text ads on them. On top of that, the cost per click (CPC) was 25% lower than text ads. And Tours and Activities Ads also had a halo effect for the standard text ads that were served alongside, boosting clickthrough rate (CTR) by 3x.

“Not so long ago, we were limited to testing variations in the description line of a text ad,” he says. “But there’s just so much more you can do with these richer formats. There are a lot more ways to get our brand involved in the search experience.”