Google Ads for tourism: what Manly and Mallorca taught me

I have run Google Ads from two beach towns on opposite sides of the planet. Manly, where Digital Freelancer has lived since 2011, fills up with Sydney day-trippers every summer weekend. Mallorca, where my Spanish agency works, fills up with half of northern Europe from May to October. Different hemispheres, same problem: a business that earns most of its year in a few months, advertising on a platform that would rather you spent evenly.

What follows is what I have found actually matters for cafés, hotels, tour operators, surf schools, holiday rentals and everyone else whose customers arrive on a ferry or a plane. None of it is exotic. Most of it is about resisting defaults.

1. Budget to the booking window, not the arrival date

The click you pay for happens when someone is planning, not when they are standing on the Corso deciding where to eat. For a hotel or a villa that can be months ahead. For a whale-watching tour it is usually the week before. For a restaurant it is that afternoon. Look at your own bookings, work out the gap between enquiry and arrival, and move the spend to the front of it. Most seasonal accounts I inherit spend heavily in peak season, when the money has already been committed elsewhere, and go quiet in the planning months when it has not.

Two practical rules. First, do not switch campaigns off in the quiet season. Smart Bidding learns from conversions, and a campaign that has been paused for five months restarts as a beginner. Lower the budget and keep the campaign alive. Second, treat seasonality adjustments as a scalpel. Google built them for short, sharp changes in conversion rate, a long weekend or a festival, and says they are meant for events of one to seven days. For the season itself, steady budgets and a target the system can learn against do more.

2. Tourists and locals search differently. Split them.

A Sydney local typing “breakfast Manly” on a Saturday morning and a Melbourne family typing “things to do in Manly” in July are not the same customer, and they should not share a campaign, a budget or an ad. The local wants a table now. The visitor wants a plan, and will book on the day the plan is made.

Location targeting is where this goes wrong. Google can show your ads to people physically in a place, to people who have shown interest in it, or both, and the default includes both. For a visitors campaign, target the places your guests come from and let the ad talk about the destination. For a locals campaign, target the place itself and talk about tonight. On Mallorca that means one campaign aimed at Germany, one at the United Kingdom, one at mainland Spain and one at the island. In Manly it means Sydney on one side and the rest of Australia, New Zealand and the usual overseas markets on the other.

3. Languages: write native copy, not translations

Google decides which language a person uses from their settings, the language they search in and their browsing history, then serves an ad in a language it thinks they understand. It does not translate your ad. If a German family searches for a finca on Mallorca in German and your campaign only speaks English, you either pay for a poor match or you do not show at all.

The fix is boring and effective: one campaign per language, each with copy written by someone who speaks it, and a landing page in that language. Mallorca’s customers search in Spanish, German, English and Catalan. Manly’s international visitors mostly search in English, but not all of them, and a Chinese or Korean campaign for a tour operator can be the cheapest traffic in the account precisely because nobody else has bothered.

4. Direct bookings versus the platforms

If you run a hotel, the booking platforms are bidding on your name right now, and they will happily sell your room back to you at a commission. A small brand campaign on your own name is the cheapest insurance in Google Ads. Beyond that, Google’s Performance Max for travel goals is built for direct hotel bookings: it needs your properties in Hotel Center or a hotel feed, and then runs across Search, YouTube, Gmail and the hotel results in one campaign. It is worth it for hotels with a booking engine. It is not for the surf school.

For everyone who is not a hotel, a well-built Search campaign plus a standard Performance Max campaign covers it, on one condition: the conversion is a booking, a call or an enquiry, not a page view. Performance Max optimises towards whatever you tell it is valuable. Tell it the wrong thing and it will find you a great deal of the wrong thing.

5. Measure what pays, and ask before you measure

Seasonal businesses take a lot of phone bookings, and phone bookings are invisible unless you count them. Call tracking on the ad, call reporting on the website and, for the more organised, importing the bookings that turn into revenue back into Google Ads, so that bidding learns from money rather than from clicks.

In Europe none of this is allowed to run before the visitor agrees to it. Consent mode is Google’s way of keeping measurement honest: the tags wait, then send full or modelled data depending on the answer. This site runs the same way, and so does every account I touch in Spain, because a large share of Mallorca’s visitors arrive from countries where the rules are enforced. Australian businesses are not obliged yet. Building it in now costs nothing and saves a rebuild later.

6. Time of day, day of week, device

Restaurants convert before mealtimes, surf schools convert in the evening for the morning after, and hotels convert on a laptop after being researched on a phone. Ad scheduling lets you shift bids by hour and day, and the reports will show you the pattern within a few weeks if you look. Do not guess. Pull the report, then schedule.

The checklist

• Map enquiry-to-arrival time for each product and front-load the budget to match.
• Never pause for the off-season. Cut the budget instead.
• Separate campaigns for visitors and locals, with location targeting set deliberately.
• One campaign per language, native copy, matching landing page.
• A brand campaign on your own name if anyone else is bidding on it.
• Performance Max for travel goals for hotels with a booking engine. Standard Search and Performance Max for everyone else.
• Bookings, calls and enquiries as conversions. Nothing else.
• Consent mode from day one.
• Ad schedule set from the report, not from instinct.

Who does this work

On the Northern Beaches, I do, and it starts with a free Google Ads health check of the account you already have. On the island, the work is done by my own team at pmax, which I will immodestly call the best Google Ads agency Mallorca has to offer: on the island since 2019, campaigns in Spanish, German, English and Catalan, and a flat monthly fee rather than a share of your spend. I would say that, of course. It is mine. The proof is in the accounts, so ask either of us for one.

Questions people ask

Sources

1. About seasonality adjustments, Google Ads Help
2. Target ads to geographic locations, Google Ads Help
3. About language targeting, Google Ads Help
4. About Performance Max for travel goals, Google Ads Help
5. About Performance Max campaigns, Google Ads Help
6. About consent mode, Google Ads Help
7. About ad scheduling, Google Ads Help