Personalisation in PPC isn’t about clever tricks — it’s about understanding who your prospective customers are and building campaigns that speak to them specifically. For tour operators and activity providers serving multiple traveller profiles — solo adventurers, families, couples, group bookers — a single generic campaign structure will underperform against one that’s built around meaningful audience distinctions. Here’s how to personalise your PPC strategy effectively for different types of traveller.
Localise PPC ads with geo customisers
Geo-customisers allow your ad copy to dynamically reflect the user’s location. For travel advertisers, this means a search for “guided tours” from a user in Manchester can serve an ad referencing Manchester departure options or proximity to regional airports. In our experience, ads that reflect the user’s geographic context — even subtly — see consistently higher CTRs than generic national copy. This is particularly valuable for ferry operators and tour companies with specific departure points, where proximity messaging is a genuine differentiator.
List-based remarketing
Remarketing lists let you serve different ads to users based on their previous behaviour on your site. For travel, this is one of the most powerful tools available — a visitor who spent five minutes on a specific tour page is a very different prospect to a first-time visitor who bounced from your homepage. Segment your remarketing audiences by the pages they visited, the destinations they browsed, and the depth of engagement they showed. Serve tailored messaging to each group: specific departure date availability for high-engagement browsers, destination inspiration for early-stage visitors.
Target non-converters through social media
Users who clicked your search ads but didn’t convert can be retargeted through paid social. Given travel’s long booking window — often months between first discovery and final booking — staying visible to non-converters on Instagram and Facebook during the consideration period keeps your brand in mind. What we’ve found is that this kind of cross-channel retargeting, combining search intent data with social reach, produces better eventual conversion rates than either channel would achieve independently.
Use Twitter and Facebook’s advanced targeting capabilities
Meta and X offer interest and behaviour-based targeting that lets you reach specific traveller profiles at scale. For tour operators, this might mean targeting users who have engaged with adventure travel content, long-haul flight searches, or specific destination communities. Building targeted audiences for each of your primary traveller types — rather than running a single broad campaign — allows you to test which messages resonate with each group and allocate budget toward the audiences that convert most efficiently.
Custom Audiences (Twitter) and Customer Match (Facebook)
Uploading your existing customer data to create Custom Audiences on Meta or Customer Match on Google allows you to target lookalike audiences — prospective customers who share the characteristics of your best existing bookers. For tour operators with meaningful customer databases, this is a highly efficient way to find new customers who are predisposed to your type of travel product. Clients often ask us how to reach high-quality prospects beyond their existing audience — lookalike targeting built from their actual customer data is usually our first recommendation.
Utilise targeting tools on The Google Display Network (GDN)
The Google Display Network allows you to reach users across millions of websites based on interests, in-market signals, and demographic characteristics. For travel brands, in-market audiences for “Luxury Travel”, “Adventure Travel”, “Family Holidays” and specific destination categories are available and well-populated. We tend to use GDN display campaigns for upper-funnel awareness alongside search campaigns that capture the intent those awareness campaigns generate — running both together and measuring their combined contribution produces better results than treating them as separate, independent channels.