Setting up Google PMax for Travel Goals for Hotels
Hi there, I’m currently learning how to set up PMAX for Travel Goals campaign for my hotel and not sure how to do it, hoping someone could answer these questions for me:
– How do I set up bookings as the conversion action? (Whether to “Create conversion actions from website events” or “Create conversion actions manually using code”, and how to do it. I know it involves installing the tag to your booking engine and I have been struggling to do that and all my conversions are “Inactive” after I launch the campaign)
– How to connect and track those booking measurements with Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager
Searching on Youtube yields only 1 tutorial from youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c02GO5fo1E4 which didn’t have a part where you configure conversion action for hotel bookings
I’m more than happy to provide monetary compensation to schedule a short call with anyone who has run campaigns successfullly before for hotels using PMAX for Travel Goals, showing me the ropes and walking me through the process. Thanks.
The short answer is:
The “Inactive” conversion status for your bookings is almost certainly due to the challenges of tracking a third-party hotel booking engine, which often blocks the standard client-side Google Ads or Google Analytics tags from firing reliably, especially if the booking process involves iframes or redirects.
The solution is to switch from the manual “Create conversion actions manually using code” or “Create conversion actions from website events” methods to using Google Tag Manager (GTM) to deploy a robust purchase event, and ideally, to implement Server-Side Tagging using a solution like Stape or Google Cloud Platform.
You should select the purchases conversion action when setting up the PMAX campaign as the video you linked mentions.
This server-side setup ensures your conversion tags fire accurately for every booking, which in turn fixes the “Inactive” issue and provides the PMAX algorithm with the reliable data it needs to optimize your ad spend effectively.
The long answer is:
Your difficulty in setting up the conversion action and the resulting “Inactive” status is a very common technical hurdle when dealing with hotel booking engines.
To resolve this, you need to establish a single, reliable source of conversion data and properly configure it in Google Ads and Google Analytics (GA4).
You should avoid manually setting up conversion actions with code directly on the website if your booking engine is complex or third-party.
The most recommended approach is to use GTM to deploy a purchase event for GA4.
You would set up a trigger in GTM that fires only on the booking confirmation page.
This trigger should push crucial booking details – specifically a transaction ID and the booking value – into the data layer, which GTM then uses to fire the GA4 event tag.
This GA4 purchase conversion is then imported directly into your Google Ads account, where you select it as the primary goal for your PMAX campaign, as this makes your measurement uniform and less prone to errors.
You will need to collaborate closely with the developer responsible for your booking engine to ensure the dynamic data layer variables are implemented correctly.
For maximum reliability, you should explore moving to Server-Side GTM tagging, utilizing an external service like Stape or your own Google Cloud Platform (GCP) instance.
This method sends the conversion data from the user’s browser to your private tagging server first, which then forwards the accurate data to Google Ads and GA4.
This setup sidesteps common client-side tracking issues like browser ad blockers and cross-domain restrictions, which are often the hidden cause of “Inactive” conversions.
The PMAX for Travel Goals campaign specifically requires that you select the sales objective and a purchases conversion action during the initial setup, so ensuring this conversion action is both active and accurate is the most critical step for success.
By implementing a server-side solution, you create a seamless and highly accurate flow of information:
Booking Engine -> Data Layer -> GTM (Client) -> GTM (Server on Stape/GCP) -> GA4 and Google Ads.
This robust system provides the PMAX AI with the consistent, high-fidelity booking data it needs to maximize your return on ad spend (ROAS).
A cheap and excellent solution to this entire conversion tracking problem involves a suite of Google and third-party tools working together:
Google Ads API, Google Analytics Data API, Looker Studio API, Google Tag Manager (GTM), and a server-side tagging provider like Stape or a simple Google Cloud Platform setup.
This integrated approach is often cheaper in the long run than compensating for lost conversions due to poor tracking.
GTM is used to reliably capture the purchase event and send it to your server-side tagging environment (Stape/GCP).
This server acts as a clean intermediary, fixing data quality issues before sending it to Google Ads and GA4, thus ensuring your PMAX campaign always optimizes against accurate booking data.
Once that data is clean and accurate in GA4, the Google Analytics Data API allows you to extract this information reliably and without sampling, while the Google Ads API lets you programmatically fetch detailed PMAX performance and cost data.
Finally, the Looker Studio API enables you to automatically combine this precise revenue data from GA4 with the cost and impression data from Google Ads, giving you a comprehensive, low-latency, and granular view of your campaign’s true performance and profitability without manual effort.
This removes the “Inactive” error and elevates your tracking from a struggle to a cheap, automated, and powerful competitive advantage.
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