A PPC campaign without clearly defined KPIs is just paid spend with no feedback loop. The metrics you track should be chosen based on what you’re actually trying to achieve — and for travel businesses, that usually means enquiries, bookings, and revenue, not just clicks. Here are the six PPC KPIs we track consistently for every travel campaign, and what each one tells you.
Clicks
Clicks are the most basic activity metric — they tell you your ads are generating interest and driving traffic. But clicks alone don’t indicate success. In travel, where a single high-value booking can be worth thousands of pounds, a campaign driving 50 clicks but generating 5 tour bookings is far more valuable than one driving 500 clicks with no conversions. Track clicks as a volume indicator, but always read them in context with cost, conversion rate and booking value.
Click Through Rate (CTR)
CTR measures the proportion of ad impressions that result in clicks. It’s both a performance metric and a Quality Score input — a higher CTR contributes to better Ad Rank and lower CPCs over time. In our experience, CTR benchmarks in travel vary widely: branded campaigns typically see 10%+, while generic destination or activity searches sit lower. What matters is whether your CTR is improving relative to your own historical baseline, and whether it’s strong enough to maintain competitive Quality Scores.
Cost Per Click (CPC)
CPC tells you what you’re actually paying for each click after the auction. For travel advertisers, CPC can vary enormously by keyword — branded terms are cheap, while high-intent destination and tour-type searches can be expensive, especially where OTAs are bidding aggressively. Track average CPC, but also monitor it by campaign and keyword type. What we’ve found is that CPC creep — a gradual increase in average costs that doesn’t correspond to better results — is one of the earliest signs that a campaign needs structural attention.
Conversion Rate (CVR)
Conversion rate is the proportion of clicks that complete a desired action — an enquiry form submission, a phone call, a direct booking. For tour operators, this is usually the most important operational KPI because it directly reflects how well your landing pages and messaging are converting interest into pipeline. Clients often ask us what a good CVR is for travel PPC — and the honest answer is that it varies significantly by trip type. A day activity at £60 will convert differently to a £3,000 escorted tour. Benchmark against your own history and track changes as you iterate on landing pages and messaging.
Impression Share
Impression share tells you what proportion of available auctions your ads are appearing in. A low impression share usually means you’re losing visibility due to budget limitations or low Ad Rank. In travel, impression share data is particularly useful during peak booking windows — if your impression share is dropping in January when competition intensifies, that’s a specific problem worth addressing before the key planning period passes. Lost impression share data (lost due to rank vs. lost due to budget) tells you which lever to pull.
Bounce Rate
A high bounce rate on PPC landing pages is a signal that something is wrong — usually a mismatch between ad copy and landing page content, or a poor mobile experience. For travel, a visitor who searched for “guided walking tours Tuscany” and lands on a generic Italy holidays page will bounce at a high rate because their expectation wasn’t met. We tend to review bounce rates alongside Quality Score data: a poor landing page experience affects both.
Reporting on PPC KPIs
The right reporting cadence for travel PPC is typically weekly for performance monitoring and monthly for strategic review. Weekly reporting catches issues early — a spike in CPC, a drop in conversion rate, an impression share decline — while monthly reviews allow you to assess trends, evaluate the impact of optimisation changes, and plan budget allocation for the period ahead. In seasonal travel businesses, monthly reviews should always be set against the booking calendar: a dip in August may be entirely expected given where that month sits in the booking cycle.