In travel PPC, you’re not just competing against other tour operators – you’re competing against OTAs with ten-figure marketing budgets, aggregators who bid on every destination keyword, and sometimes the very airlines and hotels that make up your product. Understanding the competitive landscape your ads are operating in is essential for making smart decisions about keywords, bids, ad copy and landing page positioning. Here’s how to approach it systematically.
- Search Keywords
- Ad Copy
- Landing Pages
1. Search Keywords
Keyword-level competitor analysis tells you which terms your competitors are actively bidding on, at what intensity, and where they’re concentrating their budgets. For tour operators, this is particularly useful for identifying which destinations or trip types are highly contested – and which represent gaps where you can compete at a lower CPC.
Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs)
Manual SERP analysis – searching your target keywords and reviewing what appears – gives you a real-time view of who’s competing for each query. In travel, the picture varies significantly by keyword intent: high-intent queries like “guided Morocco small group tours” may show a mix of specialist operators and OTAs; broader queries like “Morocco tours” will typically be dominated by aggregators and price comparison sites. Understanding where you can realistically compete – and where you can’t – is a critical input to your keyword and bidding strategy.
Use Google’s Ad Preview and Diagnosis Tool for this analysis rather than live searches – repeated manual searches for your own keywords inflate your impression count and can negatively affect your expected CTR signal.
Ad Preview Tools
Google Ads’ built-in Ad Preview Tool lets you simulate search results for any query, location and device without generating impressions. For tour operators running location-specific campaigns or targeting different source markets (UK, US, Australia), this is essential – your ad visibility in a Sydney search will look very different to a London one, and the competitors you’re facing in each market may differ significantly.
Auction Insights
Auction Insights is the most direct competitive intelligence available within Google Ads. It shows you which domains are appearing alongside yours in the same auctions – their impression share, overlap rate, outranking share, and position above rate. In travel accounts, we tend to see OTAs like Booking.com and GetYourGuide with very high impression shares on broad destination keywords, but lower overlap on the specialist, high-intent queries where operators with expert positioning can genuinely compete. Use Auction Insights to identify where your impression share is being suppressed and by whom.
More tools:
Third-party tools give you visibility into competitor keywords and estimated spend that native Google Ads reports don’t provide:
- SpyFu: Shows historical keyword data, estimated spend, and ad copy variations for any domain.
- SEMRush / Ahrefs: Provides paid keyword data, traffic estimates, and competitor domain comparisons.
- iSpionage: Specialises in PPC competitive intelligence with ad copy and landing page tracking.
2. Ad Copy
Reading competitor ad copy tells you how they’re positioning their offer and what claims they’re making in the auction. In travel, look specifically at: what unique selling points they lead with (price, experience, group size, awards, specialist credentials), what CTAs they use (book now, request a quote, download itinerary), and whether they’re making trust claims (ATOL protection, Trustpilot rating, years of experience) in the limited character space available.
The goal isn’t to copy what competitors do – it’s to identify the claims that are already saturating the market and find angles they’re not covering. If every competitor is leading with “Best Price”, there’s an opportunity to differentiate on specialist expertise, group quality, or departure certainty. What we’ve found in travel accounts is that specific, verifiable claims (“Guaranteed departures from 2 travellers”, “15 years operating in East Africa”) consistently outperform generic superlatives in CTR and conversion.
3. Landing Pages
Your competitors’ landing pages reveal how they’re converting the traffic they’re paying for. For tour operators, the most important elements to analyse are: how quickly they establish trust and credibility, how clearly they present the product and what’s included, what their primary CTA is and how prominently it’s positioned, and whether they address the typical objections a traveller has before enquiring (group size, solo traveller welcome, what happens if a departure doesn’t fill, deposit and cancellation terms).
Pay attention to whether competitors are using dedicated landing pages for paid traffic or sending clicks to standard tour pages. Dedicated landing pages with tighter messaging and a single CTA will generally outperform product pages designed for organic browsing.
How to use competitor research
Competitor analysis isn’t about replicating what others do – it’s about understanding the battlefield so you can make better decisions about where and how to compete. In travel, the operators who consistently perform well in paid search are those who understand their specific competitive advantage and communicate it clearly in every element of their campaigns: the keywords they target, the copy they write, and the pages they land traffic on. If you’d like an audit of your competitive position in your key destination or product categories, get in touch.