Blue Poppy Holidays: scaling Valley of Flowers treks on Google Ads

Challenge

• A season that runs roughly June to September, with every attempt to raise budget pushing cost per enquiry up at the same rate.
• Broad match keywords were buying “Valley of Flowers images”, “best time to visit” and job-related searches from people who were never going to book a trek.
• Smart Bidding was optimising towards a thank-you page view that fired again on every refresh, inflating reported conversions by roughly 30%.
• Every ad pointed to the homepage, whether the search was for Valley of Flowers, Hemkund Sahib, Kuari Pass or Chopta.

Strategy

• Fix the conversion definition before touching bids, so the algorithm learned from real enquiries.
• Rebuild the account around the three trek circuits and their departure dates, separating brand, trek and research intent.
• Send each high-spend trek query to a matching page with dates, group size, price and what is included.
• Increase budget in stages against a cost-per-enquiry ceiling instead of all at once.

Implementation

Result

• Cost per enquiry: ₹395 (from ₹640), a 38% reduction
• Peak-season enquiries per month: 340 (from 190) with only a 10% increase in spend
• Share of spend on priority treks: 81% (from 38%)
• Wasted spend on non-commercial searches cut by 46%

Key learning