Case Study: Google Search Ads for a Hotel

Client Overview: a hotel in the midwest needed to increase their booking numbers. Seasonality was affecting them badly and they needed to get in front of more relevant potential customers.

Objective: Get a profitable Google Ads campaign running - our target ROAS is anywhere above 5x.

Strategy: The conversion tracking was all set up for them so we could operate with the assumption that the conversion and purchase data will all be correct.

We did some digging into the hotel customer type and typical keyword research, but started mainly with common-sense and intuition to curate a high-quality list of keywords with a lot of purchasing intent. Targeting the people who are likely to convert along with the keywords that people are likely to search before booking made for a winning strategy very quickly.

Results:

Shortly after launching, across a 30 day period, the metrics are as follows:

Clicks: 1285

Cost Per Click: $1.35

Total Cost: $1732.01

Conv. Value: misleading in Google Ads (see below)

Conversion value is being misinterpreted in Google Ads because there is also a call conversion that is contributing to the "value". For a better understanding of conversion value we can use Google Analytics:

Conv. Value: $10326.40

ROAS: 5.96

The report in GA4 is indicating a very high amount of "direct" traffic. This traffic had to start somewhere, and based on tertiary metrics it's very reasonable to assume that the ROAS for Google Ads should actually be higher.

The branded traffic campaign on G Ads was getting a lot of very cheap clicks, which is why we need to rely on data-drive-attribution in GA4 to really get an idea of how the ads are doing.

Success: The goal ROAS was 5x - we're driving a ROAS of 6, and have reason to believe the revenue attributed to Google Ads should actually be higher. As you can see in the screenshots we have increased the spend in that timeframe and will likely continue to do so as we get results from it.