Situation

The Nassau Paradise Island Promotions Board (NPI) is chartered with generating demand and interest for all of Nassau and Paradise Island so that all hotel constituents are supported. Post-pandemic NPI needed to maintain elevated demand for island visitation although challenged with navigating 2023’s critical external factors, such as inflation impacting consumer spending and travel demand and consumer planning behavioral shifts.
As their media partner, Net Conversion faces the challenges of sustaining revenue growth and brand awareness year over year through an omnichannel strategy to maximize all media channels and, more particularly, maximize and leverage search efforts to ensure growth and revenue to Nassau’s hotel and island constituents and partners.

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Results

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Our broad match brand search campaigns drove +126% impressions visits within the experiment trial period (4-week period), while our category broad match campaigns drove +95% impressions compared to our base campaigns. All campaigns exceed performance goals and objectives during this test. Broad brand campaigns saw a +70% increase in conversions while maintaining -3% CPCs (+60% above our conversion rate goal), and category brand campaigns saw a similar increase with +63% in conversions. Within the 4-week experiment period, broad match search campaigns pushed an incremental 1.4K referral visits to partner sites and 90% of these sessions were from new users. Exceeding all goals of increasing website traffic and conversion rate, our team will implement broad match campaigns to our search efforts moving forward to ensure continued incremental interest for the Nassau Paradise Island Promotion Board.

+70%

Increase in Conversion

90%

New Users from Website Referral Visit

Objective

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To generate island visitation by driving interest through search efforts, measured by an increase in website traffic by 20% and conversion rate by 10% (web traffic/linkouts to hotel partners) on an already YoY strong performance base. To ensure we were generating incremental interest, we also set a goal to have at least 10% of website visitors from new users. 

• Increase website traffic by 20%
• Increase Conversion Rate by 10%

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Implementation

After doing some research, our team discovered that recent advances in AI, particularly in large language models (LLMs), have improved Google Ads’ broad match feature. Broad match allegedly has become more effective in understanding search queries on a deeper level, identifying keyword search intent, and taking into account the order of words in the query, additionally allowing it also to enhance routing traffic to the right keywords and recognizing multilingual searches.

Due to these advancements, our team tested broad matches within our top-performing Google Ads brand and category search campaigns. Top performing campaigns were categorized as the top five campaigns per campaign type with the most efficient CPA vs. control. We created an experiment within the campaign within our Google Ads account to implement broad match keywords and added the selected keywords with the broad match modifier. The modifier ensures that our ads are triggered for search queries that include variations, synonyms, and closely related terms. Once we set up these keywords, we wanted to ensure that our brand safety and quality stayed intact by double-checking campaign control negatives and ad group control negatives based on regularly reviewed search term reports to identify irrelevant and low-performing search queries.