Managing Google Ads across multiple tour products, destinations and seasonal campaigns is genuinely complex – more so than most industries. You’re not just running one campaign; you’re often juggling separate campaigns for different departure types, market segments, and budget periods that shift dramatically between January’s peak enquiry season and quieter mid-year windows. Bid management tools help bring that complexity under control. Here are the three we use most regularly with travel accounts.
Search Ads 360
Search Ads 360 (formerly DoubleClick Search) is Google’s own enterprise search management platform – and for tour operators running campaigns across multiple markets or currencies, it’s particularly powerful. It allows centralised bid management across Google and Microsoft Ads, with automated bidding rules built around your specific KPIs.
What makes it especially useful in travel is the Floodlight conversion tracking, which integrates tightly with Campaign Manager and allows you to track complex conversion paths – useful when your customer’s journey involves multiple touchpoints over weeks or months before an enquiry. You can set bid strategies around a target CPA, impression share, or revenue goal, and let the platform make adjustments across your portfolio of campaigns automatically.
SA360 works best for larger accounts with significant spend and multiple active campaigns. For tour operators managing 10+ campaigns across multiple destinations, the portfolio bidding approach – which can pool conversion data across related campaigns to hit a blended CPA target – can genuinely outperform campaign-level bidding where individual campaigns lack sufficient volume on their own.
MarinOne Bidding
Marin is a cross-channel bid management platform that connects Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, Facebook and Amazon into a single management view. For travel brands running both paid search and paid social, the ability to manage and report on both from one platform – with shared audience data flowing between channels – is a real operational advantage.
The keyword resuscitation feature is worth knowing about for seasonal travel accounts. Marin can automatically increase bids on dormant keywords when signals suggest demand is returning – useful for operators whose destination campaigns go quiet for months and then need to ramp back up quickly ahead of peak booking periods. Auto-populating dimensions also help when you’re running large accounts with consistent campaign naming structures across destinations.
In our experience, Marin works particularly well for operators who are running coordinated search and social campaigns around the same destinations or departure windows – the cross-channel reporting makes it much easier to understand the combined cost of acquisition rather than viewing each channel in isolation.
Kenshoo (now Skai)
Kenshoo, now rebranded as Skai, offers a range of bid management and optimisation tools suited to smaller and mid-market advertisers. For tour operators who don’t need the full enterprise functionality of SA360, Skai provides solid automated bidding with detailed real-time reporting and a more accessible price point.
The detailed reporting is one of Skai’s stronger points – you can set up custom dashboards that track the metrics most relevant to travel campaigns, including impression share by destination, CPA by campaign type, and spend pacing against monthly budget caps. For operators who need visibility across multiple active campaigns without the overhead of a full enterprise platform, it’s a practical option.
All three platforms offer free demos, so if you’re considering a move from native Google Ads bidding to a third-party tool, it’s worth testing before committing. The right choice will depend on your spend level, the number of campaigns you’re managing, and whether you need cross-channel capability or are primarily focused on search. If you’d like to talk through which approach suits your account, get in touch.