Return on ad spend (ROAS) is one of the most useful metrics available to travel advertisers, but also one of the most frequently misapplied. For tour operators and travel companies where average booking values are high but the path from ad click to confirmed booking can span months, using ROAS correctly — rather than as a blunt efficiency benchmark — is essential to making good budget decisions. Here’s what ROAS actually means and how to use it well in travel PPC.
What exactly is ROAS?
How is it calculated?
ROAS is calculated by dividing the revenue generated by your ad campaigns by the amount spent on those campaigns: Revenue ÷ Ad Spend = ROAS. A campaign that generates £10,000 in revenue from £1,000 in ad spend has a ROAS of 10x (or 1000%). For tour operators, applying ROAS accurately requires reliable revenue attribution — which means properly tracking which bookings originated from paid campaigns, including those where the booking happened days or weeks after the first paid click. In our experience, operators who invest in proper GA4 conversion tracking and attribution setup get far more reliable ROAS data than those relying on last-click attribution alone.
How does ROAS differ to ROI?
ROI (return on investment) accounts for all costs — ad spend, agency fees, platform costs, and operational costs of delivering the travel product. ROAS only measures the ratio of revenue to ad spend. For tour operators, ROAS is the right metric for evaluating individual campaign efficiency; ROI is the right metric for evaluating whether your digital marketing investment is profitable as a whole. Both are useful; they answer different questions. Clients often ask us whether a target ROAS of 4x is “good” — and the honest answer is that it depends entirely on your margins. A ferry company with thin margins needs a very different ROAS target to a premium escorted tour operator with higher booking values and healthier margins.
7 Ways to Use ROAS in PPC
1. Setting Expectations
ROAS targets need to be set relative to your business model. For high-average-value tour bookings, a ROAS of 6–10x may be highly profitable. For lower-margin products, you may need 15x or more to justify the spend. The starting point is understanding your booking economics — average booking value, margin, and close rate from enquiry — and working backwards from there to define what ROAS is commercially viable. We tend to see travel advertisers get into trouble when they set ROAS targets based on benchmarks from other industries rather than their own numbers.
2. Budgeting
ROAS data by campaign and destination helps you allocate budget to where it’s working hardest. A campaign driving a 12x ROAS deserves more budget; one tracking at 2x needs investigation before more money goes in. For tour operators with multiple destination campaigns, ROAS analysis regularly reveals that a handful of campaigns are driving the bulk of the commercial return — which is information you can use to concentrate spend efficiently during peak booking windows.
3. Bids
Target ROAS is a Smart Bidding strategy in Google Ads that optimises bids in real time to achieve your defined ROAS target. For travel campaigns with sufficient conversion history (typically 30+ conversions in the past 30 days), Target ROAS bidding can improve efficiency significantly compared to manual CPC. What we’ve found is that Target ROAS works best when the conversion value tracking is properly configured — if Google is bidding toward ROAS without reliable revenue data, it optimises toward the wrong goal.
4. Ecommerce
For tour operators with direct booking capability, passing transaction values through to Google Ads and GA4 enables ROAS tracking at a granular level — by campaign, ad group, keyword, and even individual tour product. This level of visibility allows you to see which specific tours and destinations are delivering the best return from paid search, and adjust creative, bidding, and landing pages accordingly. The investment in e-commerce tracking setup pays back quickly in better budget allocation decisions.
6. Combining ROAS with other metrics
ROAS in isolation can be misleading. A campaign with a high ROAS but low volume may be delivering efficiently on a small audience but missing significant untapped demand. A campaign with lower ROAS but high volume may still be commercially viable at scale. In our experience, the best travel PPC reporting combines ROAS with volume metrics (conversions, revenue) and efficiency metrics (CPA, CTR) to give a complete picture of each campaign’s performance — not just how efficiently it’s spending, but whether it’s spending enough to capture the available demand.
Get in Touch
If you’d like help setting ROAS targets and optimising your travel PPC campaigns for commercial efficiency, get in touch with the Summon team. We work exclusively with tour operators, ferry companies, airlines and activity providers.