SUCCESS STORY
Increasing PPC Conversion Rate through Geotargeting
A TravelBoom Marketing Case Study on Golden Sands Beach Resort
Geotargeting is a type of advertising that uses location data to reach consumers with messaging appropriate to their location.
Ensuring that your Pay Per Click ads are being delivered to the right people at the right time can mean the difference of earning a profit or barely breaking even.
TravelBoom sought to increase both conversion rate and ROAS of hotel PPC campaigns through the use of geotargeting for Golden Sands Beach Resort.
The results? An unprecedented increase in major KPIs.
Situation and Background
Golden Sands Beach Resort, a quaint Carolina Beach oceanfront hotel in North Carolina, was struggling in Google Ads with a low conversion rate and poor ROAS for branded campaigns.
After some investigation, TravelBoom found that this was due to intense competition from some of the top OTAs, causing a low search impression share – a metric measuring the percentage of impressions your ads receive compared to their potential impression volume. Combined with a more common resort name, the campaigns were receiving an increased number of unqualified clicks.
Key Factors:
- Increased OTA competition
- Low search impression share
- A resort name shared with a variety of other hotels and products
Check out our Top 10 Strategies to Increase Hotel Direct Bookings and fight off the OTAs.
Methodology
TravelBoom sought to implement geotargeting for all of Golden Sands Beach Resort’s PPC campaigns. After reviewing the resort data, we performed the following updates to the account:
- First, we added location qualifiers to all ads within the account to distinguish the North Carolina beach resort from others in the United States with a similar name.
- Second, we took Golden Sands Beach Resort’s nationally-targeted brand campaign and narrowed the geotargeting to 12 of the top-revenue generating East Coast states surrounding the resort.
Learn more about how to refine your ad targeting in an effort to improve your pay per click performance.
“It’s much easier to double your business by doubling your conversion rate than doubling your traffic.”
– Bryan Eisenberg
Results and Analysis
In the initial 30 days after the location targeting was narrowed compared to the period prior:
For the Campaign that was Changed:
- Cost decreased by 14%
- Conversions increased by 400%
- ROAS increased by 1314%
- CR increased by 275%
- Cost per conversion decreased by 83%
- CTR increased by 22%
- Average CPC decreased by 35%
For the Account Overall:
- Cost increased by 10%
- Conversions increased by 148%
- ROAS increased by 331%
- CR increased by 31%
- Cost per conversion decreased by 56%
- CTR decreased by 25%
- Average CPC decreased by 42%
331%
Increase in
ROAS
148%
Increase in
Conversions
31%
Increase in
Conversion Rate
56%
Decrease in
Cost Per Conversion
Summary
It is imperative to not only collect data, but become intimately familiar with it in an effort to maximize your returns and make smart marketing decisions.
Through geotargeting, TravelBoom was able to improve the performance of the Golden Sands Beach Resort pay per click account through decreasing the number of unqualified impressions and clicks by only showing ads to travelers who were most likely to visit . This meant driving more qualified traffic to the website, in turn increasing conversions and return on ad spend with a minimal increase in spend.
Want to kick your PPC performance up another notch? Check out everything you need to know about PPC ad testing.