How to integrate GetYourGuide ads into WordPress

The GetYourGuide affiliate program is ideally suited for websites centered around travel, tourism, and destination-related subjects featuring travel guides, reviews of attractions, sightseeing recommendations, and similar content.

4 Reasons at a glance why GetYourGuide is a great affiliate partner

• Diverse Inventory: GetYourGuide offers many travel experiences, from city tours to adventure activities and cultural excursions. This diversity ensures there’s something for every type of traveler, increasing the likelihood of conversion for your audience.
• Global Reach: With operations in numerous destinations worldwide, GetYourGuide provides affiliate partners access to an international audience. This expansive reach opens opportunities to monetize traffic from various regions, enhancing earning potential.
• High Conversion Rates: GetYourGuide’s user-friendly platform, detailed descriptions, and authentic customer reviews contribute to high conversion rates. You can benefit from these factors as an affiliate partner, earning attractive commissions for referred bookings.
• Reliable Support & Technology: GetYourGuide offers robust affiliate support and advanced technological solutions. From dedicated account managers to efficient tracking tools, they provide the necessary resources to optimize your affiliate marketing efforts and maximize earnings.

Overall, the GetYourGuide affiliate program perfectly matches you if you run a travel or destination-related website.

Signing up for the GetYourGuide partner program

Here are the step-by-step instructions for signing up for the GetYourGuide affiliate program as a blogger or website admin.

1. Go to the GetYourGuide partner page. 
2. Enter the required information, including your name, email address, website URL, and social media handles if you plan to share your affiliate links there too.
3. Complete the registration by clicking the “Sign up” button.
4. Click on the activation link in the email from GetYourGuide and log in to the affiliate partner dashboard.
5. Add your payment settings and finalize the account creation.

Now, you can monetize your website traffic with the GetYourGuide affiliate program.

The GetYourGuide ad widgets

Let’s begin by delving into the GetYourGuide advertisements. Within the GetYourGuide affiliate backend under Tools, you’ll discover various ad widgets that offer customization options for your website. In the next section, I’ll walk you through the appearance of these widgets and guide you on integrating them into your website content during the creation process.

Activity Widget

This activity widget offers a dynamic way to showcase relevant activities alongside your content, featuring enticing images and crucial details. It is designed to be mobile-friendly, so it adapts to any device your audience uses. Consider integrating various activities from the same region into thematically aligned content for optimal performance.

You have the choice between two types: automatic and manual. The automatic widget streamlines the process by analyzing your content and presenting suitable offers. On the other hand, the manual widget provides greater customization flexibility. Here, you can personally curate the displayed tours, selecting specific options or letting GetYourGuide choose based on location or search terms. From my experience, manually selecting tours often yields the best click-through rates.

However, with manual selection comes the responsibility of periodically checking tour availability. But fret not. If a linked activity becomes unavailable, GetYourGuide redirects users to an overview page with similar options, ensuring you recover every click.

Meanwhile, the automatic widget filters out activities that are no longer available on the platform. 

To track performance effectively, you can assign a campaign label to each GetYourGuide widget, facilitating future analysis. Additionally, you can specify the language of the displayed content.

During customization, a preview in various device sizes helps ensure a good user experience. Once you set your needed customizations, it’s time to implement the widget onto your website. But before we proceed, let’s explore the other two widget types.

City Widget

With the city widget, you can easily display information about a particular city, complete with a convenient button guiding your readers to a dedicated page featuring tours and activities for that locale.

Setting up the city widget is straightforward. You can choose the language and specify the desired city or region, with the widget adjusting smoothly to suit your readers’ devices. This widget proves invaluable when offerings are abundant for a town or region, eliminating the need for preselection.

This format performed better in my testing than the more targeted activities widget. Hence, it is crucial to align it as closely as possible with your content to maximize its effectiveness.

Availability Widget

This widget is particularly well-suited for pages dedicated to specific attractions or activities. Users can easily view live availability for their desired experiences. Their click on the widget directs them to the product information page on GetYourGuide.

Offering two formats—horizontal and vertical—the widget provides versatility to match your site’s layout. It resembles the activities widget in horizontal mode but exudes a more interactive and professional appearance. This mode showcases the prices and ratings elegantly, and users can specify the number of participants and choose their preferred language before proceeding. The date option enhances user experience by presenting a calendar view with availability and pricing details.

In the vertical format, while lacking an image, the widget presents the availability calendar, ratings, price, and input fields for participants and language selection. This version is ideal for sidebar placements alongside relevant content, optimizing space while offering essential information to users.

How to embed the GetYourGuide ad widgets into WordPress

Now that we’ve explored GetYourGuide’s official ad widgets, the next section will focus on integrating them into your website. I’ll provide a concrete example to illustrate this process. However, the steps for integration remain consistent across all ad widgets offered through the GetYourGuide affiliate program.

Create an ad widget in your affiliate partner backend of GetYourGuide

In your affiliate account on GetYourGuide, head to Dashboard > Tools, and choose the ad widget you wish to create. Complete all necessary settings. Once you’ve finished crafting and personalizing your widget, scroll down to locate the two fields containing the ad code. Both snippets of code are required, so copy both to your clipboard.

I’ll use an availability widget for this example to show my approach.

Copy the code into a new ad unit

Return to your WordPress backend and proceed to Dashboard > Advanced Ads > Ads. Click on the button to create a new ad.

Assign a descriptive name to locate the ad later in your backend, such as “GetYourGuide:  Saint-Anne Marine Park and Moyenne Island Cruise (Activity Widget)”.

Choose the Plain text and code ad type and paste the ad code from your clipboard into the Ad Parameters field.

Remember, including both code snippets obtained from the GetYourGuide backend is essential to ensure the GetYourGuide ads will be displayed. Simply paste both codes into the Ad Parameters field, one after the other.

Finally, publish the ad.

Place the ad on your website

The final step is to incorporate the ad into your content. You can achieve this by utilizing a placement to insert it into all your pages automatically.

I’ve opted for automatic integration using a Content Middle placement in this example. This choice allows me to embed the widget into numerous posts and pages smoothly.

However, if you prefer manual insertion into specific posts or pages, I suggest manually placing the Advanced Ads widget or the ad’s shortcode in the desired location.

Refer to the provided manual for more comprehensive guidance on manually positioning ads using placements, shortcodes, widgets, or PHP functions.

Promoting GetYourGuide with affiliate text links

Links reign as the preferred solution within the GetYourGuide affiliate program. They’re straightforward to implement and guarantee an exceptionally high conversion rate.

Create GetYourGuide text links

Within the GetYourGuide Affiliate backend, a dedicated section streamlines the creation of text links to your desired target page with just a few clicks. Navigate to Tools > Links.

Here, you can either input a complete target link or utilize the integrated search feature to explore regions, cities, or specific activities. GetYourGuide will then present you with a selection of products suitable for linking. Additionally, you can assign campaign labels to each link to track their performance effectively.

Since the implementation process differs slightly from the aforementioned GetYourGuide ad widgets, I’ll provide detailed guidance on their optimal usage in a separate section of this tutorial.

How to embed affiliate links from GetYourGuide into WordPress

Text links aren’t suited for traditional banner spaces as they can be too subtle. They perform best when integrated closely with the content, ideally as part of the text. Therefore, manually including these links using their shortcodes is advisable.

To begin, create an ad featuring the text link. Copy the desired link from GetYourGuide’s link generator. Then, navigate to Advanced Ads > Ads and paste it into a new ad.

Select either the Plain text and code or the Rich Content ad type, and designate a descriptive name for the ad to aid in quick identification later, such as “GetYourGuide: Victoria St. Anne Marine National Park Tour (text link)”.

Save the ad and copy its shortcode. Next, open the post where you wish to embed the link and insert the plain shortcode within the text—no need for a shortcode block. Add the inline parameter to prevent a line break after the affiliate link and to ensure that the text continues to flow normally. The shortcode could look like this example:

[the_ad id="18933" inline="1"]Code language: JSON / JSON with Comments (json)

Now, Advanced Ads will replace the shortcode with the link and your ad link will be visible on the frontend.

Additional uses for text links, e.g. in tables

But there’s more versatility to text links beyond simply integrating them into the body of your articles.

For instance, you can smoothly embed them into overview tables to recommend curated trips and activities on specific destination pages.

Plugins like TablePress offer boundless creative possibilities, allowing you to create tables or infoboxes with booking links in just a few clicks.

Another effective strategy is incorporating a GetYourGuide affiliate link into a call-to-action element. Utilizing the standard block editor of WordPress, you can quickly generate this ad code and subsequently manage such buttons with Advanced Ads.

Refer to our manual for comprehensive instructions on styling ads using the block editor.

Productivity tip: Duplicate ads

Managing affiliate links or ad widgets from GetYourGuide on your website can become overwhelming, especially when you need to create numerous ads. Instead of dealing with a static banner or a single activity widget, you’re suddenly tasked with crafting multiple ads, each with its affiliate link or GetYourGuide widget.

For instance, if you’re embedding affiliate links into a travel blog post about the Seychelles, you’d typically need to create a separate ad unit for each activity mentioned. This process could mean generating several hundred ad units per website on my destination websites!

Fortunately, there’s a simple yet powerful feature in Advanced Ads Pro that can significantly streamline your workflow: the Duplicate Ads feature. With just one click, you can clone an existing ad unit. Then, all you need to do is swap the target link, adjust the ad title if necessary, and paste the shortcode into your content or table.

While it may sound trivial, the Duplicate Ads feature saves an incredible amount of time in the long run, especially when dealing with many similar links.

Target GetYourGuide affiliate ads

When crafting effective ads, precise targeting is paramount. Ad targeting ensures that your ad units reach the right audience—those most likely interested in your offerings—thus increasing the likelihood of user engagement and activity bookings.

With Advanced Ads, you can set specific conditions dictating where and when your ads appear. For instance, you might choose to display ads solely on posts within a particular category or containing specific keywords. By leveraging these tools, you enhance the relevance of your ads, thereby boosting the chances of conversion from your target audience.

Let’s revisit our travel blog example. Imagine you aim to optimize the performance of an activity widget for Seychelles by featuring it exclusively in posts related to this island country. In such a scenario, you can apply a display condition such as Category or Post Content, ensuring the ad appears only in relevant posts or those containing the keyphrase “Seychelles”.

It’s important to note that targeting via conditions is primarily relevant to auto-injection methods, such as integrating ads into groups and inserting them into your content through placements. Further condition settings become unnecessary if you directly place ads via shortcode, such as text links within the content or tables.

Track the performance of GetYourGuide affiliate ads

Once you’ve integrated your affiliate links and ad widgets, check the frontend to ensure everything functions correctly. Following this, it’s a waiting game to observe whether your users interact with the ads and proceed to make bookings. During this phase, understanding which ads users click on and which result in sales is paramount.

The GetYourGuide partner reports

As mentioned, GetYourGuide provides a dedicated reporting system for analyzing your performance. You can access it by navigating to Dashboard > Analytics > General Performance.

• Visitors
• Bookings
• Conversion Rate
• Potential income
• Next payout sum

Additionally, you’ll see a sortable breakdown of this data in table form, providing a comprehensive overview of your performance in the GetYourGuide affiliate program.

For more detailed insights, navigate to Dashboard > Analytics > General Performance > Activity Performance. Here, alongside clear graphs depicting your top 5 cities by visitors, bookings, and conversion rates, you’ll find a table showcasing performance data for individual activities. The sort function enables you to identify particularly profitable tours. All tours accessed via your links are listed here, regardless of whether someone booked them.

Furthermore, under Analytics > Bookings, you’ll find a table exclusively listing completed bookings. You can also download this data for further analysis.

Tip: Use labels

Once you’ve assigned labels to your widgets and text links, you can delve into the performance data of these campaigns separately under Analytics > Campaigns. Here, you can compare and download data such as visitors, income, or conversion rate. With the GetYourGuide affiliate program allowing unlimited labels, there’s no need to hold back. However, it’s crucial to consider whether you want to use labels to track individual ads or prefer monitoring ad groups, such as by assigning the same label to text links and widgets in the same region.

When creating a GetYourGuide ad or text link, you can automatically define a label the generator will include as a parameter in the URL. For instance, the label for the link to the boat trip with a bike rental on Seychelles could be “Seychelles-text link.”

I recommend using Advanced Ads Tracking concurrently to monitor the click-through rates of text links and ad widgets. By integrating Advanced Ads tracking with Google Analytics, you’ll gather data that surpasses what’s available in GetYourGuide reports alone. This combined approach enables you to analyze your ad performance thoroughly.

For example, you can scrutinize which posts users clicked on GetYourGuide’s ad widgets. This insight lets you pinpoint content that is not effectively driving conversions and experiment with different banners to optimize performance.

The Advanced Ads Tracking

Utilize the Tracking add-on to monitor the impressions and clicks of all ad widgets, including your affiliate text link ads.

As mentioned, integrating Advanced Ads tracking with Google Analytics significantly expands your insights.

Furthermore, as recommended earlier, the Ad Label option is also available when generating text links. You can associate bookings with specific links by adding this label to selected links.

Additionally, the add-on offers the option to use more visually appealing and concise tracking links if desired.

You can also mask text links for a cleaner and more uniform link structure, enhancing their editorial appearance.

For instance, I am transforming a link like https://www.getyourguide.com/victoria-seychelles-l1016/victoria-st-anne-marine-national-park-tour-with-lunch-t427541/?partner_id=X0U86SD&utm_medium=online_publisher&cmp=seychelles-text-link into a prettier, shorter version like https://example.com/linkout/587633.

To track masked text links, you must modify their code and replace the link with the specific placeholder %link%. Then, paste the target URL into the designated Target URL field. Further details on using this placeholder are available in the Tracking documentation.

Proven strategies for GetYourGuide affiliates

There are several proven strategies and tricks that GetYourGuide affiliates can use to increase their sales and earnings. Here are a few examples:

Place ads strategically

Positioning ads in attention-grabbing spots is crucial. In addition to the Tracking add-on, consider utilizing extensions like Popup and Layer ads or the Sticky ads add-ons. These provide additional placements with high click-through rates. You can significantly boost your revenue potential by carefully selecting well-targeted ad widgets for these placements and continuously optimizing them.

Identify the most profitable ad widgets

Determining which ad widget performs best and drives the most bookings requires thorough testing. Conduct split tests with different ad widgets to gauge their effectiveness. Analyze the data provided in the GetYourGuide backend to identify widgets with weak click-through rates and remove them from your ad rotations.

Target ads as perfectly as possible to your content

Aligning ads closely with your content and visitors’ search interests increases the likelihood of bookings. Utilize Display and Visitor Conditions to match your GetYourGuide affiliate ads with your content and visitors’ preferences.

Highlight high-converting tours

Give prominent visibility to activities on GetYourGuide with high conversion rates. These could include tours with top ratings, unique offerings, or prime locations. Featuring such tours can lead to better earnings due to their higher conversion rates. 

Under Analytics > Tours & activities > Deals & promotions, you’ll discover a table of activities featuring a sortable discount column. This functionality enables you to swiftly identify products suitable for promotional campaigns, making it easy to advertise special promotions effectively.

Regularly check the GetYourGuide platform for new activities in your destinations that you can promote. Navigate Analytics > Tours & activities > New activities to list new activities. Utilize filters to search for activities in specific countries or cities.

Utilize analytics tools

In your GetYourGuide affiliate account, explore filterable and sortable tables of numerous activities under Analytics > Bestseller coverage. These tables can help you quickly find suitable tours for your destination and sort them by price, rating, or number of reviews.

Optimize your content and target low-competition keywords

Enhance your website’s visibility on search engines by using relevant keywords related to your destination. However, ranking well with highly competitive keywords can be challenging. 

Instead, focus on identifying less competitive keywords with significant search volume. Provide unique, value-added content such as travel guides, itineraries, and reviews to attract readers and encourage them to book through your affiliate links.

Conclusion about the GYG affiliate program

GetYourGuide’s affiliate program presents an ideal opportunity for monetizing travel-related content focused on specific places and destinations. Depending on your website’s thematic focus, you can generate significantly higher revenues than traditional display ads.

Partnering with GetYourGuide offers numerous advantages: You gain access to many activities and tours worldwide, backed by GetYourGuide’s strong branding, which often translates into a high conversion rate. Moreover, this advertising smoothly integrates with your content, making it less intrusive and more appealing to your visitors.

However, consider leveraging Advanced Ads All Access to maximize your earnings and streamline your workflow. This comprehensive solution extends the possibilities, simplifies workflows, improves targeting, and boosts conversion rates. With Advanced Ads All Access, you can monitor performance effectively, ensuring you get the most out of GetYourGuide’s affiliate program.

If your website features travel-related content, exploring the potential of GetYourGuide’s affiliate program is a must-do to transform it into a lucrative source of passive income.

FAQ Getyourguide affiliate program