Google is often the first place people will go to make their travel plans, so it only makes sense for the search engine giant to offer its own dedicated platform for discovering tours and experiences.
Introducing Google “Things to Do” - one of the best ways to help your travel business improve visibility and generate more bookings.
This tool provides a convenient way for users to discover and book tours through Google. By using the right tour booking software and optimizing your website, Things To Do could help you boost sales significantly.
We’ll explore how to use it for your travel business in the guide below.
Google Things To Do is a feature that is replacing Reserve With Google. Things To Do lets you search directly for experiences and tickets on Google, where users can make direct bookings through the operator’s website or through other listed booking channels.
With this feature, Google can create dynamic trip cards to promote your activities based on your inventory.
The exciting aspect of Google Things To Do is that it offers bookings for tours and activities - something that Reserve With Google didn’t offer.
When a user makes a search query for an activity, tour, or experience, Google Things To Do displays a “tickets” tab. The tickets tab shows all of the ticketing options for the experience, with each option linked to the ticket suppliers' checkout page.
This means that users don’t purchase tickets directly through Google, but they are directly guided to the relevant checkout page.
When a user searches for an attraction, they can scroll down and discover a wide range of tours and activities within the range of their search. This new feature offers some exciting benefits for tour operators.
The Google Things To Do “tickets” button is visible in searches on both Google and Google Maps.
Google Things to Do is a great way to help travel businesses increase sales and enhance their digital presence. Here are some of the main reasons why.
Google Things To Do displays your tours and experiences to anyone searching for similar experiences in your area. This means that people don’t have to search for your tours directly, but they can easily discover and book your tours.
Optimizing your Things To Do listing with relevant keywords can help with SEO and gives you more opportunities for your site to rank in search results.
This is similar to how using Google My Business can help with local SEO.
Bookings are made through your booking pages, so you can use this feature to attract more traffic.
Of course, the main reason to use Google Things To Do is to increase your online bookings. This feature makes it easy for users to discover tours and book them straight away.
As long as you have a carefully crafted and well-optimized booking page, you can use this service to maximize bookings.
With elements like the fully integrated check-out that doesn’t take you out of the website, easy-to-add booking buttons, and payment options that make your offers even more appealing - you’re almost guaranteed to see a rise in traffic on your site, and ultimately, conversions in the form of booked tours and experiences.
An official site badge is displayed on your Google Things To Do listing, which tells users that they can book directly from you. This is helpful, as travelers prefer booking with a business directly instead of using a reseller.
As you would expect from a Google run feature, listing your tours and travel experiences on Things To Do is free. This creates the ultimate opportunity for businesses to expand their reach and prospects for sales.
Here are the top strategies and tactics to keep in mind when using Google Things To Do for your travel business.
Google Things To Do is an excellent way to improve your travel business’s online visibility and direct more traffic toward your booking pages.
However, if you’re going to turn your traffic into paying customers, then it is pivotal that your booking pages offer a seamless customer experience.
Google Things To Do doesn’t give you much room to go into a lot of detail about what your tours or experiences offer.
Instead, you are simply allocated a dynamic card that displays your listing. So, make sure to include thorough information in your booking pages to answer all the questions your prospective travel clients might have.
Your booking pages should also be visually appealing, and display relevant images, and possibly videos, of what your tour offers.
WeTravel’s tour booking software makes it easy to create stunning booking pages to promote your tours. Having a travel-specific page builder will help you create booking pages that stand out from the competition and entice customers to book a tour on your platform.
Another major benefit of Google Things To Do is that you can run ad campaigns with this feature.
These ads follow a similar format to Google Shopping Ads - where they include your business name, images of your experience, prices, and a booking link.
If you run ads on Google Things To Do, your listing will be positioned at the top of the search results. This makes for an effective way to attract more traffic to your booking pages and outrank your competitors.
Of course, this avenue requires an ad budget. However, if you optimize your ads and ad spending properly, these campaigns could boost your bookings significantly.
All of the same bidding strategies for regular Google Ads campaigns are available for Google Things To Do Ads.
Google Things To Do can help you bring more interested customers to your site, but it’s your job to ensure they follow a seamless navigational path to complete their tour booking.
To achieve this, you will need to optimize your website for easy bookings and payments. There are a couple of ways that you can do this to provide the best possible user experience.
Using tour booking software that provides a fully integrated experience is crucial. This means the user doesn't ever leave your site when making their booking and payment. This can help to establish trust and create a smoother customer journey.
Ensure your tour booking software offers a feature whereby you can add booking buttons on your website and booking pages. These buttons should require a simple setup, and blend into your site naturally.
If it's easy to create and manage booking pages, you’ll have a lot more power over optimizing your site for your customers.
You’ll also want to give your customers as many different payment options as possible when they check out. Offering flexible payments and different payment solutions will help to make your offers even more appealing to a wider audience.
One of the key methods to attracting a lot of bookings from Google Things To Do is making sure that your offers are competitive.
While this feature on Google makes it easy for users to discover your tours, it also makes it easy for users to discover your competitor's tours and compare prices and packages.
This means that you will need to ensure that your pricing is within market-related standards and attractive enough to make your business stand out.
You can achieve this by staying up to date with market trends. Regularly check your competitor's pricing strategies and offers, and ensure that your proposals compete to draw more traffic to your site.
Clearly advertise the value in your tour packages so that potential clients can see what your pricing entails and all the major benefits that come with choosing your platform.
Connecting your business with Google Things To Do does require you to transfer data and go through a fairly technical integration process if you decide to integrate with Google directly.
Follow the steps below:
The other option is to connect to Google via one of the official connectivity partners. This can simplify the process if you don’t want to go through all of the technical work involved in a direct integration.
You can find Google’s list of approved connectivity providers here.
Listing your tours and travel experiences on Google Things To Do is an excellent way to bring more traffic to your site and increase your online tour bookings.
Not only is this new feature free, but also, once your listings are set up, it doesn’t require much effort from your side.
Using the Google Things To Do tool can greatly impact your SEO efforts and travel business marketing strategies.
To capitalize on the major advantages, make sure that your website is optimized for bookings, and you could significantly boost your business growth.