Episode 34
Why Your Paid Ads Look Better Than They Are
Your rankings depend on Google. Your reviews depend on your guests. Paid is the one place where you decide today who sees you tomorrow.
Find out what your ad dashboard isn't telling you
In this episode of the Tour Operator Growth Podcast, Nikki and Greg are joined by Tana Lancaster, ResmarkWeb's paid media manager, who runs Google Ads, Meta, Microsoft search and native, Taboola, and early ChatGPT ads testing. Tana came to the industry after years of paid media outside it, and the first thing she did was pull apart twelve months of one operator's ad account. What she found is the reason for the episode's question: is your paid media actually working, or does it only look like it's working?
The audit found one channel returning about 22 times what went into it, two channels returning essentially nothing, and roughly a third of all revenue that couldn't be traced back to any source at all. Tana walks through the five things she checks when she opens an account: whether tracking survives the handoff to the booking system, whether the ads are speaking to the person who actually buys, how much of your budget is lost to impression share, which device the booking really happens on, and where the money is sitting versus where it's working. Her point isn't spend more. It's that most operators are making funding decisions from a dashboard that's missing part of the story, and the fix starts with measurement, not budget.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Why should tour operators run paid ads at all?
Because it's the only channel you control. Your rankings depend on Google and your reviews depend on your guests, but paid is where you decide today who sees you tomorrow. SEO and content are essential, and they run on a timeline your season doesn't. Paid moves this week, and it tells you which trips and which messages convert so you can build organic content around the answer.
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How do I know if my paid ads are actually working?
Judge them against your real booking data, not the platform's version of it. Platforms report on what they can see, and what they can see is usually incomplete. If a third of your revenue has no traceable source, your return numbers are being calculated on a fraction of your wins, and every channel decision you make from that report is a guess.
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Why doesn't my ad data match my booking numbers?
Because attribution breaks at the handoff. Someone clicks your ad, lands on your site, and analytics knows exactly where they came from. Then they move into the booking system to reserve, and the source gets dropped on the way across. The booking is recorded; where it came from isn't. In the audit, those lost visitors were the most valuable ones on the site by revenue per session.
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What happens if I leave conversion tracking broken?
You do more than mislead yourself. Broken tracking actively teaches Google and Meta to go find you more of the wrong customer, because you're feeding them the wrong signal about who converts. It also makes bad performance and bad measurement look identical, so you can't tell whether a channel should be switched off or simply fixed.
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What is lost impression share, and why does it matter?
Google will tell you what share of the searches you were eligible to appear on you actually showed up for, and how much of what you missed was purely because the budget ran out. Around 15 percent is a rough benchmark. Above that, you're handing conversions to a competitor for no reason other than how your money was arranged: budget parked in campaigns that haven't produced a booking in a year, while the searches that genuinely bring people to your booking page run out of money by lunchtime.
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Should I judge mobile ads by mobile bookings?
No, and this is where operators switch off the ads doing the work. In the audit, about six in ten sessions came from phones but phones produced about two in ten dollars, making a desktop visit worth roughly six times a phone visit. That isn't a reason to cut mobile. It's how this purchase works: people find the trip on their phone, think about it, talk to whoever they're traveling with, and book on a laptop days later.
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Where should operators be putting paid budget next?
Two places most aren't looking. Microsoft native (MSN, Edge, the audience network, plus Taboola) has less competition than Meta and reaches an older, higher-income, desktop-heavy audience, which is closer to who actually books high-value trips. And ChatGPT ads, still early and worth testing small, because people are asking assistants instead of searching and ads are starting to appear inside the conversation. Whoever gets there first pays the least for it.
