Case Overview
Sabah Travel
A Google Ads programme across 42 tour products, built on one rule: put paid budget only where organic could not already win, and make every click trace back to a specific product.
Sabah Travel runs day trips and multi-day tours across Sabah and Labuan, 42 products in total, from island hopping and wildlife river cruises to the North Borneo heritage train, Semporna diving, glamping and spa. The programme launched under the Explore Sabah and Labuan x Tourism Malaysia II partnership, running search in Malaysia and Singapore alongside YouTube Shorts.
Three problems shaped the strategy before a single ad went live. The client already owned page one organically for its best terms, ranking in the top five for around 1,680 keywords including its own brand name and its highest volume products, so paid ads on those terms would have bought clicks the client already got for free. The 42 products had never been split into a real ad structure, so there was no way to tell which product a booking came from. And Singapore was a completely untested market, with no prior spend and no prior data.
The account's own conversion setup also counted a Book Now button click as equal in weight to a completed booking, which meant a rising conversion count could look healthy while saying nothing about whether the client had actually sold anything.
We rebuilt the account around product-level structure, protected the budget from the keywords the client already owned, and measured on real bookings rather than raw conversion count.
Our work included:
How We Did It
Identified the roughly 1,680 keywords the client already ranked top five for and excluded them, so paid budget never competed with the client's own organic listings.
Split 42 products into 13 product-based ad groups with matched landing pages and UTM tracking.
Search live in both markets from 18 April 2026, with Singapore run as a controlled test rather than scaled on assumption.
Awareness and remarketing running alongside search, held to a three-month conversion checkpoint written into the strategy.
Search term review, negative keyword expansion and product-level reallocation against the safeguards set at launch.
YouTube is the programme's clearest open question: awareness is working, conversion has not, and it is being reviewed against the three month checkpoint the strategy itself set. Spend, budget, cost per booking and return on ad spend are not published here. What a campaign costs is the client's to disclose, not ours.
Client data shared in the call, not on the internet.
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