A German travel agency, booking Australia through multilingual Google Ads.
How we rebuilt Time To Backpack's Google Ads programme into a multilingual engine: leads up 196% year on year, peaking at 507 conversions a month from German-speaking travellers booking campervan adventures across Oceania.
Where Time To Backpack was when we walked in.
Time To Backpack are a specialised German travel agency connecting German-speaking adventure travellers with campervan rentals and travel experiences across Australia, New Zealand, Fiji and Southeast Asia. By mid-2023, after disappointing results from previous agencies, the Google Ads programme wasn't translating their genuine niche expertise into bookings. The language and geographic complexity that should have been a competitive advantage was instead operating as a barrier.
The brief was a full multilingual rebuild. Every piece of ad copy, every landing page, every keyword set needed to work in German. Targeting needed to find German-speaking travellers across four core markets: Germany itself, Austria, and the diaspora-style German speakers already in Australia and New Zealand who were planning trips. The job was to make multilingual complexity a strength rather than a friction.
- Previous agencies had under-delivered on a complex multilingual brief
- Ad copy + landing pages not consistently in German across all touchpoints
- Geographic targeting trying to do too much with one undifferentiated campaign
- Negative keywords missing in both English and German, with budget bleeding to irrelevant searches
- Conversion rate suppressed by language mismatches and weak intent targeting
- Cost-per-lead too high to allow meaningful spend scaling into peak booking seasons
Time To Backpack "New bookings they never had before. That's the Firewire effect. Brogan and the team have delivered dramatic SEO growth, a Google Ads campaign that converts, and results that have genuinely taken this business to the next level. We can very highly recommend."
Three moves that turned multilingual complexity into a paid engine.
- 01
Restructured the account by geographic market
Four markets, four campaign architectures.
We split the account into separate campaign structures per geographic market: Germany, Austria, Australia (German-speakers), New Zealand (German-speakers). Each market got its own bid strategy, audience targeting and budget allocation, so high-performing markets could scale without being averaged-out by lower-performing ones.
- 02
Rebuilt every touchpoint in German
Ad copy, landing pages, negative keywords.
Multilingual Google Ads only works if every touchpoint is consistent. We rewrote ad copy in native German, rebuilt landing pages in German, and built negative-keyword lists in both German and English to prevent budget bleed into irrelevant queries. The language consistency lifted both Quality Score and conversion rate immediately.
- 03
Tightened intent targeting on travel-planning queries
German-speaking, AU+NZ-bound, ready to book.
We mapped the highest-intent German travel-planning queries (campervan rentals, Oceania-bound tour packages, route planning) and targeted them precisely with conversion-focused landing pages. Cost-per-lead came down 40% as the targeting tightened; conversion rate lifted 25% as the landing experiences matched intent.
- Full account audit + restructure Phase 1
- Per-market campaign architecture (×4) Phase 1
- German-language ad copy across all campaigns Phase 1
- German landing-page rebuild Phase 2
- Bilingual negative-keyword discipline Phase 2
- Intent-mapped audience targeting per market Phase 2
- Continuous A/B + bid optimisation Ongoing
The full picture, by the numbers.
Monthly Google Ads conversions from Jun 2023 onwards. The pre-rebuild baseline (Jun-Aug 2023) shows the previous campaign's struggle; the Sep 2023 inflection is the multilingual rebuild going live, and the programme has kept compounding since, peaking at 507 conversions in April 2026.
How the multilingual engine actually got built.
Three phases of work: account restructure, language consistency across every touchpoint, and intent targeting per geographic market.
Account restructure Four markets, four separate campaign engines
The previous account had treated 'German-speakers booking Oceania travel' as one audience. They're four, and they perform very differently. Germany itself is the largest source market; Austria is smaller but high-converting; the German-speaking diaspora in Australia and New Zealand is a niche-within-a-niche with different intent dynamics.
- Germany campaign: scaled aggressively as the largest German-speaking source market
- Austria campaign: tuned for higher-converting niche traffic at lower volume
- Australia + NZ campaigns: targeted German-speaking travellers already in-region planning Oceania trips
- Budget allocation rebalanced monthly based on per-market conversion data
Per-market segmentation made the programme legible. We could see which markets were performing, scale into them aggressively, and stop averaging-out the strongest markets with the weakest ones. Each campaign optimised to its own reality.
Language consistency Every touchpoint in German, end to end
Multilingual Google Ads only works if there's no English breakthrough anywhere in the funnel. We rebuilt every German-speaking touchpoint (ad copy, landing pages, even the negative-keyword lists) for consistency.
- Ad copy rewritten in native German, not machine-translated from English
- Landing pages rebuilt in German with conversion flows that match German web conventions
- Negative keywords built in both German AND English to prevent bleed into irrelevant English searches
- Quality Score lifted as Google recognised the language match between query, ad, and landing
Language consistency was the unsung hero of the cost-per-lead reduction. As Quality Score improved, the same bid bought better positions: efficiency that compounded with the targeting improvements rather than competing against them.
Intent targeting Travel-planning queries, conversion-mapped landing pages
Once the account was structured per-market and the language was consistent, we tightened the intent targeting. German travellers searching for campervan rentals in Australia are unambiguously high-intent; we just had to make sure they saw the right ad and landed on the right page.
- Keyword research identified the highest-intent German travel-planning queries
- Campervan-specific campaigns for direct booking intent
- Tour-package campaigns for higher-consideration travellers
- Landing-page UX rebuilt around the German booking flow conventions (price guarantee, supplier transparency, reviews)
Conversion rate lifted 25% as intent + landing experience aligned. The lead growth, now running at nearly 3× year on year, came from this combination: better targeting, better landing, lower cost-per-lead, scaled across four markets. Edmund's testimonial captures it: "new bookings they never had before."
Tourism The Springs at Peats Ridge
Premium wedding and reception venue on the Central Coast: Google Ads precision-targeted across three high-value source regions for couples planning their event.
eCommerce JettProof
Australian sensory compression garment manufacturer. Paid search optimisation tuned for a specialist buyer segment, scaled across AU + NZ.
eCommerce The Good Feet Store
Australia's premier orthopaedic footwear retailer: 10 retail locations, each positioned as the regional category leader through precision-targeted paid search.
Tourism Visit Newcastle
The official destination marketing organisation for Newcastle, promoting the city's tourism, events, food and coastal experiences to a national + international audience of travellers.
Want a similar result?
30 minutes with a senior Firewire lead. We'll diagnose where your multilingual or multi-market paid search is losing efficiency, and tell you honestly whether we're the right partner to rebuild it.
- A multi-market view of your paid search opportunity
- A first-pass diagnosis of your account structure + language consistency
- Honest view on fit. We'll tell you if we're not right
- No deck, no pitch, no commitment