Peek Inside G Adventures Multi-Million Dollar Growth Strategy
If you’re in the travel industry, you’ve likely heard about G Adventures impressive growth since their inception in 1990.
With 132% growth in the last 3 years alone and revenues of $92.8 million in 2018, they are a major player in the tours market.
So how did G Adventures grow from one guy with two maxed out credit cards to the #1 small group tours company, with 28 offices and 2,200 employees worldwide?
In this article, I’ll dive into the marketing and customer acquisition strategies they’re using to grow.
What you see below is not conjecture or theory. This is the real facts behind a major travel company, the marketing strategies they use, and the tools leveraged to get to $90+million in annual revenue.
About G Adventures
G Adventures was founded by 22 year old Bruce Poon Tip in 1990 after a backpacking trip through Asia. He started the company as a way to offer people a more authentic adventure experience, rather than just the popular resorts and cruise options that were mainly available at the time.
Over the next two decades, Bruce lead G Adventures to 40% sales growth each year, including during the global recession of 2008, when Poon Tip turned down an offer of $100 million to sell G Adventures.
Under Poon Tip’s leadership, G Adventures has won dozens of awards every year, including six-time recipient of the Top 10 Employers for Young People, a lifetime platinum recipient of the 50 Best Managed Companies and for ten consecutive years was named as one of Canada’s fastest growing companies by Profit.
G Adventures has also been named by National Geographic Adventures Magazine as a best ‘Do It All Outfitter’.
The company now hosts 200,000 travellers per year, offers more than 700 tours, and provides travel experiences in 100 countries — across all seven continents.
Bruce has also written two books, Looptail and Do Big Small Things, as well as founded Planeterra, a non-profit organization committed to turning travel into impact by helping local communities earn an income from tourism.
Summary Of Their Strategy
While G Adventures uses a variety of different online strategies to get new customers, it appears the bulk of their advertising spend is on paid search ads (SEM), followed by display ads using programmatic buying.
However, they’re also spending money on Facebook and video ads.
Their search ads are driven to well designed landing pages that show the tours that they offer that are directly related to the search term. The pages often include the different tours they offer (related to the search term), photos, previous traveller reviews, and visa requirements for that country.
For example, here is their Peru landing page: https://www.gadventures.com/destinations/south-america/peru
The main offer on their landing pages is the immediate purchase of the trip.
They also offer the option for website visitors to create an account and save the trip for later, as well as opt into the newsletter for a $100 travel credit.
Traffic Profile For G Adventures
Aside from people going directly to their site (32.7% of traffic), G Adventures gets the bulk of their traffic from organic and paid search.
Organic Traffic Profile
Their organic traffic, aside from brand related searches (i.e. people searching specifically for G Adventures), comes from destination related searches (i.e. iguazu falls argentina and brazil or south georgia island antarctica), as well some general searches, like adventure travel.
Below is a list of the top search terms that G Adventures ranks in the top 1–2 positions for in Google:
Here is a couple of their higher performing organic search pages:
https://www.gadventures.com/destinations/africa/
https://www.gadventures.com/destinations/europe/
https://www.gadventures.com/destinations/south-america/
🚨Opportunity Alert🚨
There’s a huge opportunity for G Adventures to improve these pages and improve their rankings. They are well designed and attractive pages, but they don’t have much content.
If you look at their competitor pages that rank higher, you’ll find more in-depth information on the location, as well as photo and video content about the tours offered.
By adding more info about highlights of their tours, destination must-sees, other forms of media like videos, travel stories, info on how to choose a trip, etc, these pages could kill it for their SEO.
Paid Search Traffic Profile
Their paid search strategy mainly targets destination keywords for locations that they offer tours in, i.e. ‘South Africa tours’, ‘galapagos tours’, or ‘tours of South America’. See the list below for their top paid keywords:
Traffic Growth Strategies
One of the best things G Adventures has done to grow both their paid and organic search traffic, is provide a clear trip options for their target demographic groups.
Booking travel can be overwhelming for many people that are in the initial stages of planning. By making the choice clear based on factors like age, physical ability, what you want to see, what time of year you want to visit, etc, can make the buying process a lot easier on your website visitors.
G Adventures does this well. While they specifically offer adventure tours, they’ve drilled down deeper into that niche with specific types of adventure tours like — family tours, active tours (cycling, hiking, etc), tours for young professionals, and more.
Here’s a list of their most popular options:
G Adventures also uses a couple other strategies to sell tours:
- Partnerships — G Adventures has partnered with National Geographic to offer trips that they call National Geographic Journeys — https://www.nationalgeographic.com/expeditions/trip-types/journeys/
- This gives them the ability to leverage a trusted name in travel/adventure. Plus, National Geographic has set up a booking system on their site for these trips, allowing them to get new customers from National Geographics audience.
- They’ve also partnered with the Jane Goodall foundation to provide tours endorsed by Jane Goodall — https://www.gadventures.com/jane-goodall/
- Travel Agent Training — G Adventures requires travel agents to complete their training program to be able to sell their trips — https://www.journeysspecialist.com/
- This allows G Adventure to better control their brand, improve relationships with OTAs, and likely increase sales by giving their OTAs a better sales process.
- Affiliate Sales — G Adventures has created G Adventures Wanderers: https://www.gadventures.com/wanderers/
- They use Commission Junction to track affiliate links and provide 5% commission on confirmed sales. They also provide a way for travel bloggers to host/run trips through G Adventures
- Video Ads — part of G adventures social traffic (in the traffic profile above) comes from Youtube Ads.
- Youtube ads are a great sales tool for travel companies because they allow you to share a breathtaking visual of trip highlights.
- Referral Traffic — while only 2.94% of G Adventures total traffic is referral traffic, it’s very likely good quality traffic. Their success has allowed them to get media coverage on reputable sites like cnn.com, The Vancouver Sun, and The Calgary Herald. Leads that come to a site from a trusted third party, especially after reading positive info, are much more likely to purchase.
Traffic Profile For G Adventures Competitors
One thing you’ll notice from the traffic profiles below is that many of G Adventures competitors focus more on SEO and organic traffic than G Adventures.
The exception to this is Go Ahead Tours, which also focuses more on paid search and a small amount of display ads.
GOWAY.COM
GOAHEADTOURS.COM
TUCANTRAVEL.COM
TOPDECK.TRAVEL
CONTIKI.COM
TOURRADAR.COM
INTREPIDTRAVEL.COM
Top Performing Paid Search Ads
G Adventures has 22051 keywords that they are bidding on. They mostly focus on location based keywords. For example, Australia Tours. Almost all of the ads have “Small Group Tours” in the headline copy because this is an important part of what they offer.
At 22051 keywords, they are bidding on a lot more keywords than most of their competitors. This could just be because they offer a lot of destinations so there’s a lot of keywords to target. It might also mean that their trips are more profitable, allowing them to pay more for a booked trip.
It’s also important to note that they seem to use ad extensions on most of the ads. Ad extensions are extra info you can include in your ad to provide more info to the searcher.
For example, the ad below has the following ad extensions:
- The star rating — this the G Adventures overall rating in Google
- The additional website links below the ad — i.e. All Egypt Tours, New 2020 Worldwide Tours, etc.
- Structured Snippets — which included the destinations where their tours go (Destinations: Cairo, Luxor, …)
- Callout extensions: Competitive Flight Rates. 700+ Trips. Best Tour Operator 2018.
There are a couple benefits to using ad extensions. First, they make your ad bigger, pushing your competitors ads down the page.
Because they also include more info, likely useful info to the searcher, they usually get you a better click through rate (CTR) compared to your competitors. This results in paying less per click.
Ad extensions also give you more room for copy and opportunities to persuade searchers to click your ad. If you’ve ever written a Google ad, you’ve probably been frustrated at some point with how little characters you can use in the ad. Ad extensions give you more freedom to include info and additional sales points.
Below Are Their Top-Performing Google Search Ads:
Landing page:
https://www.gadventures.com/destinations/oceania/australia/
Landing page:
https://www.gadventures.com/destinations/north-africa-middle-east/egypt/
Landing page:
https://www.gadventures.com/solo-travel/
Landing page:
https://www.gadventures.com/destinations/south-america/peru/
Landing page:
https://www.gadventures.com/destinations/central-america/costa-rica/
Top Performing Display Ads
Below are some of their top-performing display ads:
Landing page:
https://www.gadventures.com/where-to-travel/
Landing page:
https://www.gadventures.com/travel-styles/cruising/expedition-cruises/
Landing page:
https://www.gadventures.com/search/?f=3b31d477fe6c
Landing page:
https://www.gadventures.com/travel-styles/national-geographic-journeys/family/
Landing page:
https://www.gadventures.com/new-tours/national-geographic-journeys/
Facebook Ads
It appears that G Adventures does not advertise very much on Facebook. It looks like the only thing they do is run traffic to new blog posts for a few months, possibly to get them some social proof.
This is the only ad they’re currently running in the U.S.:
Here’s the link to their ad library to see the couple extra ads they’re running in different countries:
https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/?active_status=all&ad_type=all&country=GB&impression_search_field=has_impressions_lifetime&view_all_page_id=322184208702363
Landing Page Breakdown
Although this breakdown is for their Australian tours, this is how most of their destination tour pages look.
This is above the fold for their Australian tours landing page: https://www.gadventures.com/destinations/oceania/australia/
Above the fold includes a destination image, in this case Australia, along with contact info, a chat box, and a drop down menu to help people find the right trip:
The next section of the page shows past travellers reviews in order to build trust and credibility:
Below the review section they show pictures from past travellers to build up social proof. This helps new website visitors to trust G Adventures experience because the pictures show they’ve facilitated a lot of trips. The traveller photos also help website visitors visualize themselves in these locations.
Next they show links to their most popular tours related to the destination. Having a “Most Popular Trips” list can really help people that are undecided or in the early stages of planning and overwhelmed with options.
Note that a ‘most popular’ category typically works for any industry.
Lastly, the footer features employees and info about how G Adventures is different. Here they’re trying to show visitors that they’re more than just a faceless giant company that doesn’t care about their travelers.
Most landing pages also attempt to collect email addresses is with a pop-up offering a $100 travel credit. This helps them follow-up with website visitors that aren’t immediately ready to buy.
🚨Opportunity Alert🚨
The pop up is a great initial attempt to collect email addresses but will likely only work on people that are further down the sales funnel and seriously thinking about travelling.
They could offer a ‘Most Popular Destinations’ or ‘Must-See Guide’ as a way to attract people that are in the earlier stages of the sales funnel, those just thinking about a trip or where they might want to go.
According to Expedia, the average person starts researching a trip about 45 days before making a buying decision.An offer for people in those very early stages is a great way to get more email addresses and nurture those people through email until people are ready to buy.
Conclusion
If you are in the tour industry, you certainly have your work cut out for you. G Adventures is already big and they’re not slowing down anytime soon.
However, I hope this brief overview has given you some ideas for your own business. I find it much more effective to learn from what’s working with the biggest players, than trying to guess.
And even if you don’t sell tours specifically but you’re in the travel industry, you should be thinking about how you can apply some of these ideas to your travel business.
Don’t start telling yourself my travel business is different so none of this applies. Trust me, after having worked with numerous travel companies — none are that different.
Also, take notice as to what is not here. What strategies and tactics are not showing up here that some experts say you MUST be doing?
Remember, test everything, track your results, and then double-down on what works. Ignore everything else. It is just a distraction.
What You Should Do Now
If you want even more inspiration for your ads, click here to download a PDF of 77 winning ads from top travel companies.
If you’re a travel or tour company and you’d like help doing a deep dive into your online ads to find opportunities and problems, click here to apply for a free marketing evaluation by me.
Thanks for reading! :) If you enjoyed it, I’d love it if you would share it with someone else that might find it useful.
