Google Ads for a Business in Eilat: How to Reach the Tourist in Town Right Now and the Israeli Planning a Vacation
Google advertising for a business in Eilat works best when you split it into two campaigns. One campaign for the Israeli sitting at home in the center of the country, planning a vacation and searching for things to do in Eilat. And a second campaign for the tourist who is already on the hotel strip, searching on their phone for what is nearby right now. Each one gets its own location setting, its own keywords, its own ad, and a budget that moves with the season. Here we explain how to build both, and how to read the prices in your own account instead of guessing.
Two audiences at two moments, and a campaign for each
A business in Eilat has two different customers on Google, and they search at different times from different places. The first is the Israeli who is planning. They sit in the Tel Aviv area or in Beer Sheva weeks before the holiday and type, from a computer or a phone, things to do in Eilat with kids or diving in Eilat price. They compare, look at photos, and want to know how much it costs and whether there is availability. The second is the tourist who is already here. They stand on the promenade or sit in the hotel lobby and type on their phone restaurant open now or water sports near me. They do not compare much. They want a call button, navigation, and a time they can show up.
The gap between the two is big because Eilat is a city of about 57 thousand residents according to the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS), with about 11 thousand hotel rooms. Most days of the year the city holds a large audience of guests who do not live here and do not know it. We collected the rest of the numbers on the Eilat tourism numbers page. What this means for Google Ads is that one campaign with one setting hits both audiences badly. It shows the tourist in town an ad about planning, and shows the planner in Tel Aviv an ad that says come now. So we build two separate campaigns, each with its own budget, location setting, keywords, and ad. A water sports beach like Kisuski or a family park like Terminal Park, both businesses we work with, meet both of these audiences every season.
| What | The planner in the center | The tourist already in Eilat |
|---|---|---|
| Where they are | At home or at work in the center of the country. Weeks before the trip | On the hotel strip, at the beach, or in town. Right now |
| Location setting | Israel, or the center and south regions. The keywords themselves contain Eilat | Eilat only, with the presence setting. A radius around the hotel strip also works |
| What they type | Attractions in Eilat for kids. Diving in Eilat price. Recommended restaurants in Eilat | Restaurant open now. Water sports near me. The business name or the beach name |
| Device | Computer and phone | Almost only phone |
| What the ad offers | Price, availability, photos, and booking ahead | A call button, WhatsApp, navigation, and opening hours |
| Hours | Evenings and weekends, when people plan | The business opening hours and a bit before them |
| What to measure | A booking or an inquiry by form and WhatsApp | A call, a message, and navigation to the business |
The location setting is the difference between the two campaigns
The setting that decides who sees the ad is the location option, not just the city name you picked. The Google Ads help center lists two main options. The first is Presence or interest, and it is the default. It shows the ad to people who are in the location, are there regularly, or have shown interest in it, for example in searches. The second is Presence, and it shows the ad only to people who are in the location or are there regularly. The difference sounds small, and in Eilat it decides the whole campaign.
For the campaign aimed at the tourist already in town, pick Eilat with Presence only. That way someone sitting in Petah Tikva who is interested in Eilat does not see an ad that says come now and does not waste your click. For the planner campaign, do the opposite. The location is Israel or the regions your customers come from, and the match to Eilat comes from the keywords themselves. Someone who types diving in Eilat has already told you where they are going. You can also keep the Presence or interest setting with Eilat as the location, and then Google also catches people searching for the city from afar. We test both ways in the account and keep the one that brings cheaper inquiries.
Radius is a third tool. You can mark a point on the map and a radius around it. According to Google the minimum radius is one kilometer, and a small radius can cause ads to show intermittently or not at all, because the audience inside it is too small. In Eilat that means a one kilometer radius around a single beach will not run steadily. A radius of a few kilometers around the hotel strip on the north beach does catch the people in the hotels and on the promenade, and less of the people living in the residential neighborhoods. Often the simple setting of Eilat with Presence is enough, and that is where we start.
Keywords tourists actually type in Eilat
The planner and the tourist in town type different words, and you can see it in the account search terms report. The planner almost always types the city name. Attractions in Eilat. Things to do in Eilat with kids. Kosher restaurant in Eilat. They add price and cheap and recommended because they are comparing. The tourist in town drops the word Eilat because they are already there. They type restaurant near me or water sports, or the name of the beach they can see from the hotel. That kind of search also happens on Google Maps, which is why the Google Business Profile and the campaign work together.
In the campaign for the tourist in town you can therefore use keywords without Eilat, because the presence setting already limits the audience to the city. In the planner campaign the keywords must include Eilat, or a well known beach or area name, otherwise you pay for someone looking for diving in Herzliya. Both campaigns need a negative keyword list that gets updated every week from the search terms report.
- For the planner. The service name with Eilat. The service name with price, or with kids, or with recommended. The holiday name with Eilat when a holiday is coming
- For the tourist in town. The service name without Eilat. Near me and open now. The beach or area name. Your business name, because whoever heard about you from the concierge searches for it by name
- For both. Negative keywords for jobs, hiring, free, and other city names. Check the search terms report every week and add to the list
- For locals. If the business also serves Eilat residents, split them into their own campaign too, with everyday service keywords and no vacation words
How much a click costs in Eilat, and why we do not give a number
There is no single number for the price of a click on Google for a business in Eilat, and whoever gives you one is guessing. We did not find any published benchmark in Hebrew for click prices in the tourism trades in Eilat. The benchmarks that do exist in Hebrew cover nationwide industries, not a seasonal tourism city. The price per click is set in an auction, based on who else is bidding on the word at that moment and on the quality of your ad and page, so it moves between industries, between months, and between the two campaigns we described.
What you can do is read your own business numbers. Before starting, open the Google Ads Keyword Planner, pick Israel as the location, and type in your keywords. Next to each word you get two columns of top of page bid. A low range and a high range. According to the Google help center these are approximations of the 20th and 80th percentile of what advertisers paid in the past for that word in the location you picked. It is not your price, but it is the order of magnitude you start budgeting with.
After the campaign runs for a few weeks, the real number sits in the average cost per click column in the account, next to the cost per conversion column. For a tourism business the cost per conversion matters more than the price per click. A cheap click that brings no call is more expensive than an expensive click that brings a booking. So compare your account numbers between the two campaigns and between months, not against someone else benchmark. We described the full method on the Google Ads management page.
Budget by season
A Google Ads budget in Eilat does not get split into 12 equal parts. It follows the city demand curve. According to the CBS, hotel room occupancy in Eilat stood at 66.4% in the first quarter of 2024, 87.9% in the third quarter, and 91.6% in July 2024 alone. That gap is the gap between how many guests are in the city in January and how many in July, so it is also the gap in the campaign for the tourist in town. When the city is empty that campaign gets almost no searches, and there is no point pouring budget on it.
The planner campaign works the other way around in time. It needs to go live weeks before the city fills up, because the Israeli books the vacation in advance. Your own exact window shows up in last year reports. We laid out the full monthly demand and budget calendar in the article on the Eilat marketing calendar by season. The rule of thumb we work by is simple. The planner campaign gets most of the budget before a holiday and before summer, and the tourist in town campaign gets it during the holiday itself and during the summer itself. In winter both drop to a base budget that keeps the account alive and the data flowing.
Calls, WhatsApp, and running hours
The tourist in town wants to call or send a message, not fill in a form, so their ad needs a call button and a WhatsApp button. In Google Ads you do that with assets that get added to the search ad. A call asset adds a phone number, and on mobile it shows as a call button under the ad. You can set it to show only on the days and hours when someone answers the phone, and you can turn on call reporting so Google counts the calls as conversions.
Note a change on Google side. The old call ads, which were entirely a call button, are being retired. According to the Google Ads help center, from February 2026 you cannot create new call ads, and from February 2027 the existing ones will stop showing. Google recommendation is a regular search ad with a call asset. Whoever still runs old call ads needs to move them over before they go dark.
WhatsApp comes through the message asset. According to the Google help center it adds a button to the ad that opens a conversation in WhatsApp, SMS, or Messenger, with an opening message you write in advance, and it is available for Search and Performance Max campaigns. Google notes the asset is still in beta and not every account sees it. If it does not show in yours, the workaround for now is a prominent WhatsApp button on the landing page.
Running hours are the last setting. Ad scheduling lets you pick days and hours, and according to Google you can set up to six windows per day for each campaign, based on the account time zone. The tourist in town campaign runs during the hours someone actually answers, because a call that lands in voicemail is a click paid for nothing. The planner campaign can also run in the evening and over the weekend, because that is when people plan, and there the inquiry comes by form or WhatsApp, which you can answer in the morning.
A landing page for the tourist on mobile, and what to measure
The ad brings the click and the page closes the inquiry, so the page for the tourist in town is built differently from the page for the planner. The tourist browses on mobile at the beach, on a hot device, with short patience. In the first second they need to see what the business is, where it is, and how to get there, and get three buttons. Call, WhatsApp, and navigation. The planner needs photos, price, availability, answers to questions, and a way to book or leave details. Two pages, not one. How to build pages like that, ones that load fast on mobile, we described on the website building page.
Measurement is what turns the two campaigns into two numbers you can compare. Without conversion tracking you know how much you paid and not what you got.
- Step 1. Link the Google Business Profile to the Google Ads account. That way the location asset shows an address, distance, and a call button in the ad, and the ad can also show on Google Maps
- Step 2. Turn on call reporting on the call asset and set a call above a certain length as a conversion
- Step 3. Set a click on the WhatsApp button and a click on navigation as conversions on the site. Those are the actions of the tourist in town
- Step 4. Set a booking or a details form as a conversion. That is the action of the planner. If you have a booking system, connect it so you see a booking and not just a click
- Step 5. Open the search terms report and the cost per conversion of each campaign separately every week, and move budget to whichever brings cheaper inquiries
A boutique hotel and villas get one more route
Whoever sells lodging has one more door on Google besides the campaign. In the hotels module in the search results, Google shows free booking links next to the ads, and according to the Hotel Center help pages there is no payment for them and no active campaign is required. The condition is sending Google prices and availability, usually through the hotel booking system. It does not replace the planner campaign, but it is worth checking before paying for every click.
If you would like us to go over your account, we would be glad to sit on the numbers and see whether the campaign speaks to both audiences or only to one of them. We are based in Eilat and we see both of these moments from the beach.
Sources and verification
Every figure in this article was checked against two independent sources before publication. The numbers are given as published in the source, with their date noted next to them. Anything we could not verify twice is not written here as fact.
- The Google Ads help center. The location options Presence and Presence or interest and which is the default. The one kilometer minimum radius and the note about small radiuses
- The Google Ads help center. Call ads and their retirement dates, February 2026 and February 2027. Call assets, their scheduling, and call reporting
- The Google Ads help center. Message assets for WhatsApp, SMS, and Messenger, and their beta status
- The Google Ads help center. Ad scheduling with up to six windows per day per campaign and the account time zone
- The Google Ads help center. The Keyword Planner and the top of page bid low and high ranges as approximations of the 20th and 80th percentile. Location assets and the link to the Business Profile
- The Google Hotel Center help pages. Free booking links and the conditions for joining
- Search Engine Land and other PPC guides. Second confirmation for the call ads dates, the minimum radius, ad scheduling, and message assets
- The Israel Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS). Release 032/2025 on tourist hotel stays in 2024, with monthly occupancy in Eilat. The local authority profile of Eilat for 2023 with the number of residents
- The local Eilat outlets Yom Yom BeEilat and IAS. Reports on the CBS occupancy figures for 2024 in Eilat and on the number of hotel rooms in the city
This is exactly what we do at Google Ads management. If you want us to go over it together for your business, write to us.
Frequently asked questions
There is no fixed amount. The budget needs to cover a few dozen clicks a week in each campaign so there is data. Start in the Keyword Planner with your keywords and Israel as the location, look at the top of page bid range, and multiply by the number of clicks you want. If the budget does not cover two campaigns, start with one. During the season, the tourist in town. Before the season, the planner.
Yes, but small, and mostly to locals and for weekends. In winter occupancy in Eilat is far lower than in summer according to the CBS, and the campaign for the tourist in town gets almost no searches. Keep a base budget so the account holds its history and tracking, and prepare the Passover campaign to go live weeks before the holiday.
Google catches demand that already exists. Someone types diving in Eilat and the ad answers them. Facebook and Instagram create desire in people who did not search. The two moments we described exist on Google in the clearest form. The tourist in town with the phone in hand, and the planner typing the city name. So start with Google and add social networks when there is budget for content and video.
In the campaign for the tourist in town, set the location to Eilat with the Presence option, not Presence or interest, which is the default. That way someone interested in Eilat from afar does not see the ad. In the planner campaign you actually want people outside Eilat, but only ones who type Eilat in their keywords. Check both campaigns in the locations report to see where the clicks actually came from.
Usually not as a first step. Performance Max lets Google decide on its own where to show the ad and to whom, and it needs many conversions to learn. A small business with a limited budget gets more control from a regular search campaign, with the two campaigns we described. Once there is stable conversion tracking and a few months of data, you can try it alongside search, not instead of it.
Yes, through the message asset, which adds a button to the search ad that opens a WhatsApp conversation with a ready opening message. According to Google the asset is still in beta and not available in every account. If it does not show in yours, put a big WhatsApp button on the landing page and measure a click on it as a conversion.
Want us to look at this for your business?
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