Google Ads and Facebook Ads are the two dominant PPC channels for travel brands, and they do fundamentally different things. Google captures demand — prospective customers who are actively searching for what you offer. Facebook creates demand — reaching people who aren’t yet searching but can be persuaded to start. The right channel for your travel business depends on your objectives, your audience, and where you are in your marketing funnel. Here’s how to think about it.
What to use, Google ads or Facebook ads?
For most tour operators, the honest answer is: both, used for what each does best. The mistake is treating them as alternatives rather than complements. In our experience, travel brands that run both channels in a coordinated strategy — using Meta for top-of-funnel awareness and Google Search for capturing the intent that awareness generates — consistently outperform those running either channel alone. But if you genuinely have to choose one to start with, here’s what the decision hinges on.
What is your digital marketing budget?
Google Ads requires a budget sufficient to compete in your target auctions. On competitive travel destination terms — where OTAs are bidding aggressively — CPCs can be high, and a small budget may not achieve meaningful visibility. Facebook Ads generally allows you to reach a defined audience at lower CPMs, making it more accessible on a constrained budget. If your budget is limited, Facebook advertising for awareness and retargeting while building organic search visibility may provide better early ROI than competing directly with OTAs on high-cost Google search terms.
Your industry
Travel is well-suited to both channels for different reasons. Google Search captures prospective customers who are actively planning — searching for specific destinations and trip types with commercial intent. Facebook and Instagram reach travel enthusiasts in inspiration and early planning mode, through targeted interest audiences and remarketing. For tour operators with strong visual content — destination photography, trip videos, guide profiles — Meta’s visual formats are a natural fit. For operators targeting high-intent searches where the customer is ready to compare options, Google Search is irreplaceable.
What are your digital marketing objectives?
If your primary objective is generating direct booking enquiries from people actively searching for your trip type, Google Ads is the more direct route. If your objective is building brand awareness with new audiences who don’t yet know you exist, Facebook is more efficient. If you want to retarget visitors who’ve been to your site but didn’t enquire, both channels offer strong remarketing capabilities. What we’ve found is that defining the specific objective before choosing the channel prevents the common mistake of using Facebook like a direct response channel (it doesn’t perform as well as Google for this) or expecting Google to build brand awareness at scale (it’s less efficient than Facebook for pure awareness).
Different stages in the buyer’s journey
Travel has a long and well-defined buyer journey: inspiration, consideration, comparison, decision, booking. Google Search is strongest at the consideration and comparison stages — when prospects are actively researching trip types and operators. Facebook and Instagram are strongest at the inspiration stage — reaching people who are in discovery mode before they’ve started active search research. Running both channels and managing the handoff between them — using Meta to generate awareness and Google to capture the resulting search intent — is the most complete approach for tour operators who can afford to run both.
What is your keyword search volume?
For niche trip types or specialist destinations with limited search volume — a very specific type of escorted tour to an unusual destination — Google Search may not have enough volume to sustain a meaningful campaign on its own. In these cases, Facebook’s interest and lookalike targeting can reach a relevant audience more efficiently than search alone. Clients often ask us about this challenge — how to run PPC for a product with limited search volume — and paid social is frequently the answer for building awareness that eventually generates searchable demand.
What Next?
If you’d like to discuss which PPC channels are right for your travel business, get in touch with the Summon team. We work exclusively with tour operators, ferry companies, airlines and activity providers.