Running paid search end-to-end for an attraction ticketing platform

The situation

TicketGo sells tickets to attractions online, and paid search is the main acquisition channel for that, which means the account isn't a side project running on autopilot, it's the thing that has to perform every day. Roughly €100K a month runs through it.

Attraction ticketing is a specific kind of paid search problem. Purchase intent is often extremely high (someone searching a specific attraction's name the week of their trip is close to certain to buy from someone), but the competitive set includes the attraction's own official site, other resellers, and sometimes marketplaces bidding on the exact same terms. Margin per ticket is thin enough that a few wasted euros of spend per booking adds up fast across the volume this account runs.

What I do there

1. 1

   Campaign structure and bidding. Rebuilt account structure around intent tiers rather than one flat set of campaigns, with budget shifted toward the keyword groups actually producing qualified traffic.

2. 2

   Keyword and negative-keyword management. Ongoing search-term audits to cut spend on near-misses and expand on terms that were converting but under-invested.

3. 3

   Ad copy, headlines and landing pages. Continuous testing on both sides of the click: the ad that earns the click, and the page that has to justify it once someone arrives.

4. 4

   Full-funnel tracking. Instrumented every stage from view through purchase, not just the click and the conversion event most accounts stop at.

5. 5

   Day-to-day account hygiene. Attraction ticketing accounts drift fast: seasonality shifts search volume week to week, competitors change bids without warning, and an attraction's own promotions or closures can flip what "good performance" even looks like overnight. A meaningful part of this role is simply staying close enough to the account to catch that drift before it shows up as wasted spend.

Why full-funnel tracking, not just ad metrics

Ad-platform reporting stops at the click, sometimes at add-to-cart. Everything downstream of that (checkout, payment, completed purchase) happens on TicketGo's own site, outside anything Google Ads can see. Tracking all six stages in one place means account decisions get made off what actually happened at the register, not just off what happened at the ad.

In practice, this changes what gets optimized. A campaign can look excellent on Google's own dashboard (strong click-through rate, low cost per click) while quietly feeding a landing page that loses half its visitors before checkout. Without the full funnel in view, that campaign would keep getting more budget for exactly the wrong reason. With it, the fix is obvious: the problem isn't the ad, it's the three steps after it, and no amount of extra spend on the ad side would have solved it.

Portfolio growth, tracked separately from spend

The account doesn't just run ads against a fixed catalog, the number of attractions actually being sold through it keeps growing, and that growth gets tracked as its own metric rather than folded into the ad numbers.

That gap between total portfolio and active attractions is the actual insight, not a problem. A newly added attraction typically needs weeks to build enough search history and conversion data before it performs the way a mature listing does, so a portfolio nearly doubling while the active count stays flat is exactly what healthy growth looks like mid-ramp: proof there's a real pipeline of new supply behind the account, with the payoff still landing in future months rather than all at once.

How the account has evolved

Six months ago this was a flatter, simpler setup: fewer intent tiers, thinner tracking, a smaller and less mature portfolio behind it. The version of the account running today looks meaningfully different, and the change happened in stages rather than one big overhaul.

The first evolution was structural: moving from one flat set of campaigns to the intent-tiered structure described above, which changed how budget moved on its own as performance data came in, rather than needing a manual reshuffle every time something shifted. The second was in tracking maturity: the account started on click-and-conversion-event reporting like most accounts run, and evolved into the full six-stage view it has now, which is what eventually surfaced the gap between "good ad metrics" and "good outcomes" described above.

The third, and most visible, evolution is the portfolio growth already covered: nearly doubling the number of live attractions in six months while the campaign structure and tracking underneath it kept up without needing to be rebuilt from scratch. That's really the test of whether the earlier structural work held up: a setup that only works at one size isn't actually solved, it's just temporarily fine. This one kept working as the account got bigger, which is the point of building it around intent tiers and full-funnel tracking in the first place rather than a simpler setup that would have needed redoing at this new scale.

Attraction ticketing is also a seasonal category, so part of what "evolving" means here is the account's own calendar: search volume and competitive intensity shift meaningfully between peak travel months and quieter stretches, and the account's bidding and budget allocation are adjusted on that rhythm rather than run flat all year.

Working with the client

TicketGo's CMO has described the account relationship directly: