Reserving Our Stay as the Top Bed & Breakfast in the Okanagan
Goal
Our client is a Bed & Breakfast in the Okanagan, the owners wanted to push their Summer bookings by outranking their competitors. Cost per click was low and search volume was high, but we were competing against big competition in VRBO and AirBnB. With the high volume of searches, we wanted to hit a high click through rate, and to get as many people through to the booking page as we could.
Strategy
Write Effective Ad Copy
We wanted to make sure we could capture potential customers with the unique selling points of our clients Bed & Breakfast. It is a modern farmhouse style B&B with a panoramic lake view. The ad copy had to portray this, and use illustrative language to paint a picture of “The Perfect Vacation”. We are frequently A/B testing different ad copy so that we are always using the best performing ads and they never go stale.
Conversion Tracking
Tracking conversions can be difficult when a business is using a 3rd party integration as attribution can sometimes be inaccurate. We also felt that with the hospitality industry, first time searchers generally aren’t ready to make a reservation immediately. So we tracked the usual conversions of phone calls and emails, but as our main conversion we tracked people who got through to the reservation page. This was seen as a conversion as it showed high intent, and high engagement rates. As the customer moved all the way through the process to the booking stage, they can now be considered a lead. Our client used “Cloudbeds” as their 3rd party booking system, so we also used their conversion tracking integration to track customers who completed the reservation process. During its first month, our campaign had 149 conversions.
Ad Group Keyword Testing
We started with a general bed and breakfast keyword strategy and found that there were really high numbers of “AirBnb” search terms. Instead of just excluding these entirely, we set up an AirBnB ad group to see what kind of CTR and Conversion Rate we could get by competing against the AirBnB brand. We had a CTR of around 8.3% and a conversion rate of 14.5%. These were good numbers, but our general Bed & Breakfast ad group was performing far better with a CTR of 10% and a really high conversion rate of 26.5%.
Keyword Management
Once we made the decision to remove our AirBnB ad group, we then had to continue to comb the search term report and make sure that our ads weren’t showing up for AirBnB related search terms. They have lower click through rates, lower conversion rates, and therefore convey lower intent. We only want to be showing up for high intent searches, so that we can maximize our budget’s potential.
Results
After 6 months of Google Ad Management we have:
Click through rate of 10.28%
Managed a high conversion rate of 26.5%
Maintained a Cost Per Acquisition of $5.70
Screenshots
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