Traverse City Summer 2019 Summer Escape Accommodation Campaign
Client: Traverse City Tourism
The Scope
The goal of the program was to raise awareness about summer escapes to Traverse City, Michigan for families and small traveling groups. The creative featured a family and extended family visiting the destination along with groups of women highlighting girlfriend’s getaways. The intent of the program was to introduce the travel product to new audiences and highlight additional accommodation options to visitors with larger parties – like cottages and cabins.
The program goals were focused around website engagement metrics and queries to the Book Direct reservation engine on www.traversecity.com.
The target audiences were families, extended families and groups of women visiting the area for a getaway or reunion type of trip. Because of the location of the destination and it’s accessibility via automobile, we mainly focused on drive markets in the Michigan, Illinois, Ohio, Indiana and Wisconsin.
The Strategy
We determined through our Google Analytics analysis that there was a high interest in the cabins and cottages pages on the website as it generates a high volume of engaged traffic throughout the year, but especially in the travel planning season.
Additional research conducted on search engine queries showed that there were also high volume of searches conducted on keyword phrases like “houses to rent in Traverse City”, “cottages to rent”, “cottage rentals”, “vacation rentals”, “house rentals in Traverse City” along with several other searches related to lodging and accommodations. We also found high volumes on searches like “kid activities” and “activities for kids in Traverse city” which gave us an additional assurance that consumers were looking for a destination that was family-friendly and had adequate accommodations for larger groups.
The creative was built with the mobile canvas in mind and tailored to this group via videos that began with a vertical intro that took on the appearance of a native Instagram story. We also used Instagram and Facebook story ads to add a more authentic look to the messaging. The videos were centered around families reuniting and enjoying their time together while participating in activities within the destination.
100
1,690,855
People Reached
80,228
Link Clicks
72,000+
Pageviews
40,471
Video Views
The Results
- The campaign ads achieved 4,775,256 impressions and reached 1,690,855 people.
- All of the Facebook and Instagram ads obtained 80,228 link clicks.
- The Facebook website click ads average cost per click was $0.29, coming in 39% below the $0.48 global average reported by Nanigans.com in Q1 2019.
- The Facebook ads returned a 3.08% click-through rate, coming in 101% above the 1.53% reported by Nanigans.com in Q1 2019!
- The ads specifically targeting the cottages and cabins content received CTRs of 2.83%, 4.39%, and 6.50%
- All of the ads generated 13,279 post reactions, 643 comments, 1,489 shares, and the six videos we used were watched 40,471 times in their entirety!
- Google Analytics was able to track over 72,000 pageviews through the campaign code on the website during the campaign period.
- The ad content showed great website engagement with 20,331 website users scrolled 100% of the way through the landing page, while more than half of the campaign website users scrolled 75% or more (based on event tracking in Google Analytics)
- The four Instagram story ads showed great website engagement. Flight four saw an average time on site of 2:49 while flight three saw a 4:03 average time on site.
- The campaign generated 19,992 searches through Book Direct with 16,477 of those searches coming from new users! (based on event tracking in Google Analytics)
- Of the 60,570 unique page views, consumers spent an average time on site of 1:19 with a bounce rate of 47.73%
- Overall web traffic comparison from 2018 to 2019 included – a 39% increase in users, 40% increase in new users, 33% increase in sessions and a decreased bounce rate of 10%.
