Remarketing — serving ads to people who have already visited your site — is one of the most efficient PPC strategies available to travel brands. The economics are straightforward: someone who has already looked at your tours, read your destination guide, or started an enquiry is significantly more likely to convert than someone encountering your brand for the first time. For tour operators with long booking windows, staying visible to prospective customers throughout the consideration period is where remarketing earns its return. Here’s how to run it effectively.
What are your options?
Travel remarketing operates across multiple channels: Google Display Network (reaching previous visitors across millions of partner websites), YouTube (video remarketing to visitors who engaged with your site), paid social (retargeting website visitors on Facebook and Instagram), and RLSA — Remarketing Lists for Search Ads, which adjusts your search bids for users who have previously visited your site. Each channel suits different stages of the remarketing funnel: display for broad re-engagement, RLSA for capturing return searchers with intent, and paid social for visual storytelling to warm audiences.
How to select your audiences?
Not all website visitors are worth remarketing to with the same intensity. Segment your audiences by behaviour: visitors who viewed a specific tour page are warmer than homepage visitors; visitors who started and abandoned an enquiry form are the warmest of all. For travel, we also segment by destination interest — a visitor who spent three minutes on your Morocco tour pages gets different remarketing creative to one who browsed your Italy content. In our experience, destination-segmented remarketing — showing Morocco tour ads to Morocco browsers and Italy tour ads to Italy browsers — consistently outperforms generic brand remarketing for tour operators with broad destination portfolios.
How can you optimise your remarketing campaign?
Frequency management is the most important optimisation factor in travel remarketing. Too many impressions and you annoy prospective customers; too few and you lose share of mind during the consideration window. We tend to cap frequency at 3–5 display impressions per day per user for general remarketing, with higher frequency allowed for abandoned enquiry audiences in the week following the visit. Test different creative formats: static display ads, animated banners, and video perform differently across audience segments. What we’ve found is that remarketing creative that reflects the specific destination or trip the visitor browsed — dynamic remarketing — outperforms generic brand creative for destination-specific tour operators.
What next?
If you’re not yet running remarketing campaigns alongside your main paid search and social activity, it’s one of the most impactful additions you can make. Start with a basic Google Display remarketing campaign targeting all site visitors from the past 30 days, then build audience segmentation from there. If you’re already running remarketing, review your audience segmentation, frequency caps, and creative performance — there’s almost always a meaningful efficiency improvement available. If you’d like to discuss PPC remarketing strategy for your travel business, get in touch with the Summon team.