Cutting the cost of a booked tour from ZAR 7,642 to ZAR 544

The problem

Kabura Travel & Tours is a family-run operator in Cape Town selling private and guided tours to visitors from around the world. Tours ranged from ZAR 1,800 to ZAR 75,600, with most sitting near ZAR 9,000.

The account was running and it was spending. Over the nineteen months to August 2018 it had bought 19,953 clicks and turned them into nine bookings, which works out at ZAR 7,642 of ad spend for each one. On an average tour price of around ZAR 9,000, that is almost the whole sale.

The brief was specific: get a booked tour under ZAR 600, raise the number of bookings, and keep cost per click down while doing it.

What we changed

The account was not short of traffic, it was short of relevance. Nearly twenty thousand clicks had arrived and almost none of them were from people about to book a tour. So the work was mostly subtraction before it was addition.

• Cut the keyword set back to terms with genuine booking intent, and let the rest go
• Rebuilt campaigns around individual services and keyword groups rather than one catch-all
• Matched each ad to the keyword that triggers it, so the promise and the search agree
• Scheduled ads to the hours that were actually converting
• Targeted by location, age, income, interest and topic rather than buying everyone
• Ran multiple ads per group as A/B tests and kept the ones that won
• Reset bids keyword by keyword rather than campaign-wide

What happened

Clicks rose from 19,953 to 35,749, so the account got busier rather than smaller. Bookings went from 9 to 238. Cost per booking fell from ZAR 7,642 to ZAR 544, which came in under the ZAR 600 the client had asked for.

The interesting part is that the click count nearly doubled while the cost per booking fell to a fourteenth of what it had been. That is what tells you the original problem was targeting rather than budget.