Role: Performance Marketing Lead

Company: Jabama (vacation rental marketplace similar to Airbnb)

Background

When I joined Jabama, I noticed something was off with the Google Ads account. The company had been spending a large monthly budget, but the outcomes didn’t match the investment — traffic wasn’t scaling, conversions were low, and cost per acquisition was much higher than it should be for a travel marketplace.

What I Discovered

After reviewing GA4 data, Looker Studio dashboards, and the Google Ads structure, I found a few core issues:

• The team was optimizing mainly for CTR and Impression Absolute Top.
• These metrics looked excellent on paper, but they had become vanity metrics — they didn’t correlate with real business outcomes.
• The account relied heavily on SKAGs + exact-match keywords, which restricted learning and reduced our reach.
• Because of this over-optimization, Google’s algorithm had almost no flexibility to explore different user intents or match types.

So although the metrics “looked good,” the conversion volume, traffic scale, and ROAS were suffering badly.

My Approach

To fix this, I took a step-by-step, data-driven approach, involving both marketing and commercial teams:

1. Understanding user behavior and channel performance

I built a GA4 + Looker Studio analysis to map:

• user journeys
• conversion paths
• channel contribution
• seasonal demand patterns

This helped me understand what the search intent actually looked like — not just what our old account structure assumed.