Exploring Destination-Level Insights in Travel PPC with Looker Studio

Sure, Google Ads allows advertisers to group campaigns and ad groups by destination; you might have campaigns for Italy, Spain, France, and so on. You can even create dedicated ad groups for each city or region. But in practice, things rarely stay neatly separated.

The Overlap Problem in Travel PPC

Let’s say you're running ads for 20 different destinations. You’ve gone the extra mile to create well-structured campaigns for each one. Great. But then you add a generic campaign for “Europe holidays” to capture broader demand. Suddenly, Google starts making its own judgment calls:

• A search for “Vienna holidays” might show an ad from your Austria campaign (ideal), your Europe campaign (still relevant), or even from a campaign for Germany, thanks to keyword matching.

• A query like “Mediterranean city breaks” could pull in results from Spain, Greece, or Italy, depending on how your keywords and match types are set up.

Even with exact-match keywords and strict campaign structuring, Google’s automation introduces overlap. This makes it incredibly difficult to understand how much interest and spend is going toward each specific destination. Campaign-level reporting just isn’t granular enough.

Why This Matters: Clarity at the Destination Level

In travel marketing, each destination is essentially a product. Understanding how each performs isn’t just helpful, it’s essential.

• Where is demand coming from?

• Which destinations are underperforming?

• Where should you allocate more budget?

• Are your generic campaigns cannibalising your specific destination ones?

Trying to answer these questions with Google Ads alone means you’ll spend hours manually cross-referencing campaigns, search terms, and conversions, just to get a half-complete picture.

Our Solution: Destination Reporting via Looker Studio

To tackle the overlap and ambiguity caused by Google's keyword matching, we built a bespoke Looker Studio dashboard that gives us the clarity Google Ads lacks.

For context, Looker Studio (formerly Google Data Studio) is a free visual reporting tool from Google that connects with data sources like Google Ads, Analytics, BigQuery and more. It allows for custom dashboards tailored to specific business needs. With its flexibility and customisation, it's an ideal platform for visualising complex PPC performance across multiple destinations.

At Adido, we used Looker Studio as the foundation—but the real power lies beneath the surface. We created a custom SQL layer, using advanced logic and regular expressions (REGEXP), to intelligently scan and classify all search terms within an account. This logic associates each search query with the correct destination, regardless of which campaign or ad group it came from.

That means if someone searched for "Vienna breaks" and clicked an ad from a generic Europe or even Germany campaign, our system still categorises that interaction under Austria.

With this setup, every search term gets tagged with its relevant destination. From there, we can build a dynamic report that shows:

• Search volume per destination

• Clicks and impressions by destination

• Conversions and cost per destination

• Search term trends over time, grouped by region

Example of Looker Studio destination reporting dashboard

Why This Works So Well

This approach gives us destination-level clarity that Google Ads simply can’t provide on its own. It's not a replacement for well-structured campaigns—those are still vital—but it bridges the gap between Google’s automated keyword matching and a marketer’s need for precision.

It also helps with answering big-picture questions like:

• Are users interested in Italy really ending up in Spain campaigns?

• How much demand is being captured in generic vs. destination-specific campaigns?

• Which countries are contributing most to the conversion pipeline?

A Better Way to Optimise Budget

With this granular view, we can make faster, smarter budget decisions. For instance:

• If Austria is seeing strong conversions across multiple campaigns, we might recommend carving out more budget for that region.

• If a destination is getting lots of impressions but low conversions, we can explore whether it’s a creative issue or a mismatch in user intent.

• If generic campaigns are outperforming destination ones, we can evaluate keyword overlap and restructure accordingly.

Built for Scale: Ideal for Multi-Destination Travel Brands

This solution isn’t just a one-off fix. It’s designed to scale. Whether you have 5five destinations or 50, the logic holds. The classification system can be updated as new destinations are added, and the dashboard reflects the changes automatically.

It’s particularly helpful for:

• Tour operators with seasonal packages

• Travel brands with international portfolios

• Destination marketing organisations (DMOs)

No More Guesswork

This method eliminates a lot of the guesswork in analysing destination performance. You don’t need to dive into dozens of campaigns manually or worry about how Google has matched a search term. The report gives you a single source of truth, mapping all data back to destinations you care about.

It also helps bridge internal reporting gaps. Whether you’re reporting back to a client, a stakeholder, or your own CMO, you can now say with confidence:

• “Here’s what Austria generated in the last 30 days.”

• “Italy brought in X leads at a CPA of Y.”

• “Generic campaigns drove 60% of traffic to Spain-related queries.”

Final Thoughts

This kind of insight is game-changing for travel brands that rely on Google Ads but struggle with fragmented data. Our Looker Studio solution is purpose-built for this challenge.

We won’t go into the exact technical steps (we’ve got to keep some secrets), but if you're a travel brand struggling to understand how users are actually interacting with your ads, we can help.