Thrifty Adventures

The channel nobody picks for travel

LinkedIn is where you go to reach a job title. Thrifty Adventures sells group tours to Egypt, Namibia, Dubai and Zanzibar, to people spending their own money on their own holidays. On paper it is the wrong platform, and that is roughly what the industry assumes.

There was no paid activity at all when I started. No campaigns, no saved audiences, no tracking, and no view of what a click was worth. So the question was not how to scale LinkedIn. It was whether LinkedIn works for consumer travel at all, and what it costs to find out honestly.

Seven months and R117,322 later, it does — but not for the reason I expected going in.

One objective at a time, then all of them

July was deliberately small: R1,834 behind a single website-visits campaign, split only by whether the audience sat in South Africa or in the diaspora abroad. 29,032 impressions, and R5.80 a click, which is what an account with no history pays.

September was the real test. Four campaigns ran four different objectives at the same time — brand awareness, website visits, lead generation and engagement — because running them side by side in one month is the only honest way to learn what a platform charges you for each of the things it sells. That month produced the first 202 leads, and the comparison that decided everything after it.

Everything after that was consolidation: drop what the September comparison had killed, put the money behind what survived, and let the account's own history bring the price down.

Zero to 1.4 million impressions a month

The brochure was the whole finding

The thing that decided performance was not the targeting. Two sets of lead forms ran to the same sort of audience, on the same platform, in overlapping months. One asked people to enquire about a trip. The other offered them the 2026 travel brochure. Only one of them asked for something the reader already wanted.

36.6%

Form completion, brochureMore than a third of everyone who opened the form finished it.

8.6%

Form completion, everything elseThe identical form mechanic, with nothing to collect at the end.

10–15%

Typical LinkedIn form completionSo the brochure beat the band by more than the rest of the account missed it.

R26.74

Cost per lead, brochure540 of the 742 leads, from R14,437.

R37.13

Cost per lead, everything else202 leads from R7,500, at 39% more each.

8.93%

Engagement rate, boosted brochure postThe highest of the run, at R0.36 per engagement.

Same platform, same market, same months, same form. The variable was what the ad asked the reader for, which is the part of paid media that no amount of audience tuning fixes. The 8.93% is an engagement rate, not a click-through rate: LinkedIn counts reactions, comments, shares and follows as chargeable clicks on engagement campaigns, and that post drove no landing page clicks at all.

What seven months bought

From no paid presence on the channel at all.

R117,322

Total spendAcross 16 campaigns and six different objectives.

4.91M

Impressions29,032 in the first month, 1.37M in the last.

0.97%

Landing page CTRAcross the traffic campaigns, against a 0.52% median over 150,000 LinkedIn campaigns.

33,079

Landing page clicksAt R2.12 each, from R70,111 of traffic spend.

742

LeadsAt R29.57 each, from R21,937 of lead generation spend.

208,493

Video completionsR0.09 each, and a 25.9% completion rate against impressions.

929

New page followersPicked up alongside the engagement campaigns, not bought directly.

Click figures here are landing page clicks, not LinkedIn's headline Clicks column, which on engagement campaigns also counts reactions, comments, shares and follows. The 0.52% median is AgencyAnalytics' January 2025 benchmark across 150,000+ campaigns. Costs are in rand and are account facts rather than benchmarked ones: no credible South African or travel-sector LinkedIn cost benchmark exists to compare them against.

What didn't work

Brand awareness was the most expensive thing on the platform and I would not buy it again at that price: R8,400 at a 0.109% click-through rate and R19.76 a click. Judged as a click channel it failed outright. Judged on what it is actually sold for it did deliver 211,026 video views and 84,324 completions, so the money was not burnt — but there were cheaper ways to buy the same attention, and the run proved it.

Single-destination video posts did not travel. Egypt, Namibia and Dubai each drew between 0.10% and 0.16% CTR at R25 to R37 a click. The one composite post — a year of trips in a single edit — pulled 1,791 clicks at R0.87 and 106,232 video completions. People responded to the range, not to one place.

And the conversion column is not reportable. It records 97,475 conversions against 57,345 clicks — 1.7 per click. That is not necessarily an error: LinkedIn's Conversions metric counts actions taken after an impression as well as after a click, on a 30-day click and 7-day view-through window, and a broadly scoped rule will fire on ordinary page loads. But until it is split into Click Conversions and View Conversions it cannot be honestly described as people who saw an ad and then acted. So no conversion figure appears anywhere on this page, including the several that would have flattered the work considerably.

What I'd do differently

Run the brochure from month one. The offer that ended up defining the account — 36.6% form completion against 8.6% for everything else — only entered the mix in September, which means two months of lead spend ran on the weaker ask. The lesson generalises: test the offer before tuning the audience, because the offer moved numbers the targeting never could.

And I would configure conversion tracking properly on day zero. The broad tag made the entire conversions column unusable for seven months of reporting, and no amount of after-the-fact analysis can un-mix view-throughs from clicks. Ten minutes of setup would have bought a whole extra column of evidence.