📊 Quick Wins:
- Cost per call down 39% (£17.50 → £10.69)
- 7,500 calls in 4 months
- Landing page speed cut from 5.5s → 2.9s
- Impression share doubled (9% → 21%)
In travel, the phone call is the product. For a flight-booking business, a customer who calls is a customer who is close to booking, so the number that matters is not clicks, and not even a platform's conversion count. It is what it costs to land a call.
This is how we brought that number down for one flight-booking client's Google Ads search campaign at Teckgeekz: from £17.50 to about £10.69 per call.
The challenge
From January to March 2026, this campaign's landed cost per call averaged £17.50. That was higher than it needed to be, and three things were behind it:
- Low visibility. The campaign was showing on only about 9-10% of the searches it was eligible for.
- A slow landing page. The site ran on WordPress with a heavy theme and a stack of plugins. Even on a VPS located in the UK, its Speed Index was 5.5 s, which is slow for a mobile visitor deciding whether to call.
- Spread-out targeting. Spend wasn't focused tightly on the market and the device where calls happen.
Calls also reach this business in two ways. A customer can tap the call button in the ad, or click through to the website and dial the number there. Both are the same customer with the same intent, and both are paid for by the same click, so any honest view of cost per call had to include both.
Our approach
We set one rule: manage the campaign to landed cost per call, meaning total ad spend divided by every call the campaign lands, from both routes.
Three things made that measurable:
- A dedicated tracking number for every campaign. Every call, from the ad or from the website, traces back to the campaign that produced it.
- Website calls tracked, but kept out of bidding. They are recorded as a secondary conversion action, so we can measure them without the bidding algorithm drifting toward them.
- Reconciliation with the client's CRM. The CRM holds the full record of calls the business received, and it is the basis for the landed cost we report. On this campaign, 4,186 calls came through the ad's call extension, and the website added a further 25-30 calls every day.
With that in place, the strategy was straightforward: spend only where calls happen, keep the call option prominent, and make the landing page fast and easy to act on.
What we changed
We made all of these changes in the last week of May 2026 and tracked the results from June 1.
1. Focused targeting on the United Kingdom.
We removed Ireland from the location targeting so that every pound is spent in the UK market.
2. Went mobile only.
Calls are the goal, and a phone is where a call is one tap away. Limiting the campaign to mobile keeps the budget on the traffic that can call straight from the ad or the page.
3. Added a 10% bid increment on call extensions.
Call extensions are the most direct route from a search to a phone call, so we raised their bids by 10% to keep them prominent in the ad.
4. Rebuilt the landing page.
We moved from WordPress to Next.js with server-side rendering, a proper caching policy and server functions, hosted on Netlify. The Speed Index came down from 5.5 s to 2.9 s in PageSpeed Insights, nearly half the previous figure.
We also upgraded the interface around the action we want visitors to take, so that tracking fits cleanly and calling is easy. On a mobile-only campaign, page speed and ease of action count for a lot, because a visitor decides within seconds whether to call. This is where having web development and PPC under one roof pays off: the page and the campaign are tuned together.
5. Improved on-page content and structured data.
We rewrote page content to cover the keywords people search for naturally, without keyword stuffing. We also added JSON-LD structured data to each page: Organization schema with consistent name, address and phone details, Service schema and TravelAgency schema. That gives search engines a clear, consistent description of the business and what it offers.
The results
From June 1 to September 30, 2026, the campaign's landed cost per call averaged about £10.69, down from £17.50.
| Before (Jan – Mar 2026) | After (Jun 1 – Sep 30, 2026) | |
|---|---|---|
| Landed cost per call | £17.50 | ~£10.69 |
| Change | ~39% lower | |
| Landing page Speed Index | 5.5 s | 2.9 s |
| Search impression share | ~9-10% | ~21% |
The numbers behind the "after" column:
| Metric | Result |
|---|---|
| Period | 122 days |
| Ad spend | £80,606 |
| Clicks | 11,192 |
| Avg. CPC | £7.20 |
| Total landed calls | ~7,500 |
| Calls per day | ~62 |
| Clicks that became calls | ~67% |
Roughly two out of every three paid clicks ended in a phone call. At the previous cost per call, that volume would have cost around £132,000 instead of £80,606.
Ad rank and visibility. After the landing page improvement, the campaign's ad rank improved, and its impression share rose from about 9-10% to about 21%, an increase of around 12 percentage points and more than double the earlier share. Landing page experience is one of the factors that feeds into ad rank, and a faster, clearer, more relevant page supports it. We made several changes together, so we don't put a figure on how much each one contributed.
Where the next gains are. The campaign now appears in about 21% of the eligible searches it could show on. Nearly all of the remainder, 78.5%, is lost to ad rank, and almost none to budget. Budget is not the constraint. The levers that moved the numbers so far, landing page experience, relevance and bidding position, are where further gains sit.
Lessons for travel marketers
- Manage to landed cost per call, not to a single platform's conversion count. The customer doesn't care which button they pressed, and neither should your reporting.
- Give every campaign its own tracking number. Campaign-level cost per call isn't possible without it.
- Treat the landing page as part of the campaign. In this campaign, cutting Speed Index from 5.5 s to 2.9 s and building the page around the call action went alongside an improvement in ad rank.
- Match targeting to the goal. If calls are the goal, mobile and the right country come first.
- Reconcile with the CRM regularly. It is the final record of what the business received.
About Teckgeekz
Teckgeekz is a digital marketing and web development agency with more than 14 years of experience. We specialise in travel PPC and pay-per-call marketing, backed by flight API integration, programmatic SEO and AI implementation. If you run a travel or flight-booking business and want to know what your own landed cost per call is, and how far it could come down, get in touch at teckgeekz.com.
Figures are from a single campaign for a flight-booking client. Landed cost per call is total ad spend divided by total calls, combining calls reported in Google Ads (4,186) with website calls recorded in the client's CRM (25-30 per day, midpoint used), all attributed through a dedicated tracking number. The pre-change figure of £17.50 is the average landed cost per call across January, February and March 2026, before the changes were made in late May, calculated the same way. The two periods fall in different seasons. Results reflect all changes made together and will vary by account.
If you run airline or flight-booking call campaigns, our guide to ad scripting for travel PPC is a useful next read:
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