When a European City Tour provider approached us, their PPC account was already performing—but growth had stalled. Our job wasn’t to fix something broken, but to unlock untapped potential. The first step was a thorough audit, which revealed campaigns limited not by poor ROI, but by overly cautious budgets. High-performing keywords were hitting budget caps, restricting impression share and leaving conversions on the table.

We restructured the account around two core insights: firstly, that conversion rates were significantly higher once users had physically arrived in the tour location, and secondly, that the business model offered a unique advantage—real-time flexibility based on tour capacity.

To capitalise on this, we overhauled the campaign structure to better reflect user intent and tour availability. Campaigns were segmented by location and attraction, allowing us to tailor budgets, messaging, and bid strategies to the nuances of each destination. More importantly, we split geographic targeting to distinguish between users searching from their home countries and those already in the destination. This meant we could apply a more aggressive bidding strategy to ‘in-destination’ traffic—users who were demonstrably closer to converting.

Alongside this, we introduced a dynamic layer of capacity-based decision-making. Tours that were nearing full capacity could have spend reduced or paused altogether to prevent inefficient use of budget. Meanwhile, underbooked tours were prioritised through broader keyword targeting, dynamic search ads, and increased bids—maximising ticket sales without needing to increase cost per acquisition beyond profitable levels.

This blend of geographic segmentation and capacity-responsive optimisation enabled us to scale the account efficiently, spending more where it mattered most, and avoiding wasted investment in areas with limited or no commercial return.

The result? A transformative shift in both scale and efficiency. With a new, insight-led structure in place, the account saw a 177% increase in conversions—more than doubling the volume of tour bookings driven through paid search. Revenue followed suit, climbing by 162%. A slight fall in average value, but there more focus on filling availability over higher margin options.

The business benefitted not just from more bookings, but increased margin from running closer to capacity which boosted overall profit. By segmenting around identified customer behaviour these trends could be exploited to spend in the right place at the right time, demonstrating the power of scale when it’s guided by strategy, not just budget.

The account comfortably surpassed €1.5 million in annual ad spend—a milestone the client had never previously approached. This growth wasn’t just about spending more, though. It was about spending smarter. By aligning strategy to real-world availability and audience behaviour, we were able to support this higher investment while maintaining healthy margins.

The business benefitted not just from more bookings, but from fuller tours, more predictable revenue, and better return on spend. Improved bidding logic, capacity-aware optimisation, and deeper segmentation meant that even with a higher cost per acquisition, the client saw stronger profitability overall—demonstrating the power of scale when it’s guided by strategy, not just budget.