The Scope
TwoSix Digital developed and managed a Facebook ad campaign to drive visitors to Frankenmuth, Michigan’s Little Bavaria, in Spring 2018. The program included:
- Development of content and landing pages featuring high-interest travel product
- Facebook and Instagram Ads
- YouTube Video Ads
- Native Content Ads
The Strategy
In an effort to determine what content consumers were most interested in, we conducted an extensive audit of the organization’s Google Analytics to determine what landing pages were most popular. In 2017, we developed several blog/article pages that featured high-interest destination content including:
How to Eat a Frankenmuth Chicken Dinner
Bavarian Culture in the Community
In 2018, we refreshed all of this evergreen content for the promotion and also added two more blog/article pages featuring local attractions and shopping.
Prior to developing the campaign scheduling and ad targeting we developed a series of KPIs that included message reach, website visits, email opt-ins, visitor guide requests, and overall digital engagement.
In an effort to leverage the machine learning and audience building capabilities of the Facebook pixel, we also incorporated video ads into the campaign to assist audience building. We leveraged the video engagement parameters of the ads to build custom and lookalike audiences based on those who engaged with a percentage of the video ad. This helped us build an optimal audience for additional ad flights in the campaign. All other campaign ads were developed with link click objectives that drove traffic back to the website.
Over the two-month period duration, the campaign produced over 50 different Facebook/Instagram ad combinations, YouTube ads that featured four niche destination videos and seven different native content topics.
90,895
Web Visits to Frankenmuth.org
94,000
Views of Video and Slideshow Ads
9,232
New Email Opt-In Subscribers
1,813
Visitor Guide Requests
The Results
- The promotion generated 90,895 web visits to Frankenmuth.org
- 67,181 of those web visits were directed to the niche blog/article pages developed by TwoSix Digital
- The video and slideshow ads were viewed over 94,000 times on the Facebook platform
- The campaigns resulted in 10,734,201 impressions across all three platforms!
- Facebook website click ads averaged $0.27 per click coming in nearly 50% below the $0.50 national average reported by Nanigans in Q1 2018.
- Facebook click thru rate averaged 3.99% per click which surpassed the 1.80% average reported by Nanigans in Q1 2018 by more than 122%!
- On Facebook, we saw 27,662 Post Reactions, 2,124 Post Comments, and 5,629 Post Shares
- The sweepstakes gathered 9,232 new email opt-in subscribers.
- The campaign generated a total of 1,813 visitor guide requests.
“We were extremely happy with the results of this digital campaign not only because of the impressive KPI performance but also because it was a well-executed demonstration of using multiple mediums together to complement each other. We were also excited to be able to use the newest machine learning technology to serve more relevant content to more targeted audiences.” – Jamie Furbush, President & CEO, Frankenmuth Convention and Visitors Bureau.
