From Overspending to Outperforming

A hospitality client came to us feeling like they weren’t getting their money’s worth from Google Ads. After auditing the existing account, we noticed that they had been using the automated bid strategy Maximize Conversions. We use this bid strategy across many accounts, but in this particular case, it was inflating the cost per click without increasing conversions. The system was overpaying for traffic. The existing campaigns also lacked depth in terms of audience targeting, relying only on keywords to capture intent. 

Strategy

For our campaigns, we layered in-market audiences for travel, hotels & accommodations, and in-market travel by destination, as well as affinity audiences like luxury and business travelers. We also defined our own type of drop cart audience, segmenting users who clicked into the hotel’s booking system but didn’t complete a booking.

We layered on these audiences for observation first, and once we had enough data, we decided which audiences to target more aggressively with bid adjustments. 

Results

We launched our campaigns in January 2025, and a year later, compared them to the previous campaigns that ran in 2024. The year-over-year metrics show better performance across every data point, even while spending 38% less than the previous year. 

Most importantly, though, was the return on ad spend. 

In 2024, every $1 brought back $3.80.
In 2025, every $1 brought back $10.84.

Sometimes the best fix is the simplest. Turning off smart bidding and strategically bidding on priority audiences helped us achieve better efficiency and improved ROI. Now we can turn our focus to the client’s website and make recommendations for moving more users from browsing to booking.