294% ROI On Profit For A Travel Site
The Goal
Seaside Vacations is a full-service property management and vacation home provider located in North Carolina’s Outer Banks (OBX). Seaside Vacations looks to attract guests to the OBX to stay in one of their 450+ vacation homes. In the paid landscape, they compete against enterprise vacation rental companies such as VRBO and Airbnb with much larger budgets.
Our main goal was to drive revenue through property management and vacation rental bookings to keep ROI on profit above 100% for the 2022 – 2023 travel season.
The Strategy
Objective
Seaside Vacations looks to attract guests to the OBX to stay in one of their 450+ vacation homes. We specifically targeted geographies on the East Coast within driving distance of the OBX in states such as North Carolina, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Ohio, Connecticut, New York and Washington, DC.
We utilized both Google Search and Google Display as the main platforms for Seaside. Having worked with Seaside Vacations for many years, our knowledge of past campaign performance allowed us to target the highest ROAS keywords and optimize these based on current performance and ROI trends.
Execution
In order to compete with the big tech companies in the space, Seaside Vacations needed to have a deeper level of insights on their audience to compete in the paid media landscape.
We utilized hyper-focused geography targeting for Seaside Vacations campaigns. Based on Google Analytics data and the assumption that families preferred closer locations, we targeted states on the East Coast within driving distance of the OBX.
We also established a testing framework to target 8+ OBX locations. We focused on the top-performing locations with the highest ROAS after a 3-month test. This challenged the assumption that their customers were only in markets outside of the OBX area.
In addition to geography testing, we layered in audience targeting for observation with interests and qualities that align with their target customers. Some of these include: Family Vacationers, Water Sports Enthusiasts, and Vacation Rentals.
We also tested different query modifiers for their Search campaigns. We found that “last minute obx” keywords saw a strong ROAS and captured users looking for last minute vacation rentals.
In order to drive the highest CTR, we heavily utilized sales. We swapped out creative on a monthly cadence based on website promotions and used “Limited Booking Available” verbiage to give users an incentive to book as soon as possible.
We even kept a strong CTR during the off-season, when CTR typically dips. We utilized promotional ad copy for active sales, image extensions. Based on data we had about customers, we scheduled our ads to run between 6AM and 11:30PM to capture users when they were most likely to search and book a rental property.
The Results
The goal set forth by Seaside Vacations was to drive over a 100% ROI on profit. For the February 2022 through April 2023 campaigns, we drove a 294% ROI on profit.
In addition, we remained at the top of the SERP month over month against our two top competitors, Airbnb and VRBO, with an 89.75% top of page rate for non-branded terms.
VRBO and Airbnb are large competitors that are tough for a small business to compete with. To outperform well-funded competitors, we were required to get our audience, messaging and targeting exactly right. Since we’re hyper-focused on the OBX area, we were able to get deeper insights and better understand the target audience than these competitors might be able to.
