For tour operators and ferry companies, phone calls are often the most valuable conversion in the PPC funnel. A prospective customer booking a two-week escorted tour or a family ferry crossing is making a significant purchasing decision — and many of them want to speak to someone before committing. Call-only campaigns let you put your phone number front and centre in Google Search results, reaching high-intent users at exactly the moment they’re ready to talk. Here’s how to set them up and get the most from them.
Target users with high intent
Call-only ads work best for users who are already well into the decision stage. In our experience, the people who click a call ad for a travel business have typically already done their research — they’ve been to your site, compared a few operators, and now want to ask a specific question before booking. That’s a very different audience from someone who clicked a standard text ad in early inspiration mode. Structure your call-only campaigns around high-intent keywords: destination-specific terms, tour type searches, and branded queries. These are the searches where a phone call has the highest conversion potential.
Use location targeting
Location targeting is particularly relevant for activity providers and tour operators who serve customers from specific geographic markets. If your sales team is UK-based and your booking window research shows the majority of enquiries come from London, the South East and major northern cities, concentrate your call-only budget where it’s most likely to convert. What we’ve found is that granular location data from call campaigns can also inform your broader PPC strategy — if a particular region is consistently producing high-quality callers, that’s worth knowing across your other campaigns too.
Retarget unconverted calls
Not every call converts on the first contact — that’s normal in travel, where the booking process can involve several conversations over weeks. If you sync your call data with your remarketing lists, you can retarget users who called but didn’t book with follow-up ads — either standard text ads or, where appropriate, offers tied to specific departure dates or promotions. This kind of call-to-remarketing funnel is particularly effective during peak planning periods when prospective customers are actively comparing operators and need a reason to come back to you.
Schedule your ads
There’s no point paying for call-only ad clicks when your phone lines are closed. Schedule your call-only campaigns to run only during your business hours. Clients often ask us about wasted spend on call campaigns, and this is usually the first thing we check — ads running at midnight generating clicks that lead to unanswered calls are wasted budget and a poor experience for the prospective customer. Tight scheduling is one of the simplest efficiency wins available.
Use the URL
Although call-only ads don’t direct to a landing page, you still have a display URL that appears in the ad. Use it to reinforce your specialist credentials — “summon.co/escorted-tours” or “summon.co/guided-holidays” tells the user exactly what you offer and builds confidence before they pick up the phone. We tend to see higher call-through rates on ads where the display URL reflects the specific product the user searched for.
Work out your call-through rate
Call-through rate (the proportion of ad impressions that result in a call) is the equivalent of CTR for call-only campaigns. Benchmark it against your standard search CTRs and against the average for your travel vertical. A low call-through rate usually points to ad copy that isn’t compelling enough, targeting that’s too broad, or ads showing to audiences who aren’t ready to call yet. Testing different ad copy angles — urgency around departure availability, specific destination callouts, trust signals like years of specialist experience — will usually identify what drives the best call-through rate.
Call reporting
Google Ads call reporting gives you data on call duration, time of call, and whether the call was answered. For travel businesses, call duration is a particularly useful quality signal — a 30-second call is probably not a booking enquiry, while a five-minute call is. Use call duration filtering to separate high-quality calls from short/misdial calls in your conversion tracking, so your CPA data reflects the calls that actually matter to your business.
Always consider the caller experience
The best-structured call-only campaign in the world will still underperform if callers reach a long queue, an uninformed team member, or a generic sales script. In our experience, the operators who get the best ROI from call campaigns are the ones who treat the phone call as the beginning of the sales process — with a team that’s briefed on current promotions, departure availability, and the specific questions that commonly come from PPC callers. The campaign gets people on the phone; what happens next determines whether it converts.
Get in touch
If you’d like to explore call-only PPC campaigns as part of your travel marketing strategy, get in touch with the Summon team. We work exclusively with tour operators, ferry companies, airlines and activity providers.