Jason Ontong leads the performance marketing strategy for African online booking platform Travelstart where he focuses on driving business growth. Headquartered in South Africa, Travelstart also operates in Botswana, Kenya, Namibia, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, and Nigeria.
Travel and tourism in Africa is worth billions. The industry is expected to grow annually by 7% across the continent, generating a market revenue of R624 billion ($33 billion) by 2029. Interestingly, the same research shows that 73% of this income will derive from online sales alone, making the digital landscape for travel brands lucrative, but also more competitive.
As the industry continues to change, online booking platforms have felt the pressure to perform. At Travelstart, we knew we needed to make a change to continue growing the business, meet changing consumer behaviour, and increased price sensitivity.
In the past, we had focused heavily on the number of bookings — volume — to meet our performance marketing goals. As the second half of 2024 began, we asked ourselves: is volume still the winning factor when it comes to performance or is value a stronger metric to meet our business goals? We could simply count the number of bookings our campaigns get, or we could focus on the total revenue from those bookings and how that contributes to being profitable.
Learn how a shift from volume to value boosted our year-on-year revenue by 27%.
Travel trends in Africa: Heritage travel, local holidays, and longer stays
We are cognisant of how volatile the travel industry can be. Changes in consumer behaviour and socio-economic influences all play a role in how, why, and when people travel.
South Africa has fewer domestic carriers than the global average, which means higher flight prices and sharp competition for online sales. Despite this, 21% of locals travelled domestically at least three times last year for leisure. In fact, travel within Africa saw a boost with more people visiting Kenya and Mauritius last year and search interest for "Madagascar holiday packages” increasing by 70% in South Africa alone.
South Africans are also exploring their country in a deeper, more meaningful way. Seventy-five per cent of locals took a “heritage holiday” last year (or plan to do so in 2025), which is a unique experience that explores culture or ancestry.
South Africa has fewer domestic carriers than the global average, which means higher flight prices and sharp competition for online sales. Despite this, 21% of locals travelled domestically at least three times last year for leisure.
Visitors from overseas to South Africa are also spending more time in the country once they’ve arrived. Compared to pre-pandemic levels, the average stay has increased from 7.8 to 10.6 days. This shows just how much opportunity there is for travel brands to connect with travellers who are looking for unique experiences and to stay longer.
A new kind of performance marketing: From volume to value
These shifts in travel within our region prompted us to do a thorough audit of our marketing strategy to not only respond to these changes but also to improve marketing maturity. Performance marketing, for us, meant refocusing from volume to value since this metric better shows us how our campaigns contribute to our overarching business objectives of increasing online sales.
Our audit found two main things: our Google Ads campaigns — with the bid strategy of target cost per acquisition (TCPA) — focused on a volume of bookings as its conversion strategy. It was not able to show us the revenue value of each booking to the business. Secondly, due to the competitive constraints of domestic travel and a global market in flux, we had to increase the Rand value of each bid in our campaigns to continue driving the same amount of volume. This, ultimately, is not profitable.
Not knowing the value of each booking meant we only saw half the picture. We needed to understand our marketing’s impact on the business.
We decided to switch to value-based bidding in Search Ads 360, a strategy within Google Smart Bidding, which uses machine learning and AI to optimise bids based on a new goal of value. Unlike conversion-based bidding (TCPA), value-based bidding, such as return on ad spend (ROAS), prioritises the overall profit generated from each booking.
After shifting to value-based bidding, we made use of two crucial tools that aided in our campaign’s success: Firstly, we utilised templates which automated campaign creation and management by generating large amounts of campaigns and ads from our vast catalogue. Templates use AI to change ads quickly based on new, historical and offline data that we feed into the campaign such as flight availability, Google searches, and the popularity levels of a specific flight route.
Secondly, we activated a floodlight tag, a performance tool used for conversion and event tracking, which captured the actual value of each conversion, not just the fact that it happened.
Leveling up our campaign during peak travel season in South Africa
Our campaign ran from August to October, before South Africa’s summer season. We wanted to harness this peak travel period, in advance, by capturing bids from travellers no matter what their search query may be.
Our strategy levelled up in three ways:
- We focused on specific flight routes. We created highly specific campaigns based on exact Google searches for flight routes during periods we knew search interest would be high. For example, “joburg to cape town flights” increased during the first week of October, the first week of December, and a few days around New Year’s Eve. Our ads offered travellers, when we knew they most wanted it, exact flight routes that matched their search queries.
- Allowing AI to take us to new skies. Templates handled the heavy lifting of adjusting campaign details according to routes, flight availability, and popularity, which would’ve been manual tasks in the past.
- Our campaigns remained up-to-date and dynamic. Using real-time, historical and offline data sent back to our campaigns, templates changed our ads by the hour and by the day according to changing variables like flight availability, Google searches, and those that interacted with our ads. This kept our offering relevant and specific.
Here's an example of how this changed our ads in practice, with a popular search query, “from jnb to cpt” reflecting a price change due to seasonal changes.

A first class landing
We took flight with our value-based approach by changing our focus from volume to total revenue value. Our campaigns were able to go after the most profitable bid, not just the highest number of bids, which is the essential performance change that led to our success.
This led to a 50% increase in revenue per booking with a 12% increase in return on investment (ROI). Additionally, we increased our revenue by 27% year-on-year.
“We were able to increase booking value and maintain ROI in a highly competitive industry, making Search Ads 360 our biggest revenue driver and most profitable marketing channel,” concludes Travelstart CFO, Handre Oostuizen.