Integrated Media Plan Helps NPI Recover Conversions +5% and Website Visitation +19% YOY on Flat Spend

Net Conversion’s quick pivots and targeting optimizations empower recovery.

Net Conversion continually utilizes the most measurable channels and partners to power our audience-first strategies.

Situation

The Nassau Paradise Island Promotion Board (NPIPB) is responsible for driving interest in and bookings to the member hotel properties on Nassau and Paradise Islands in the Bahamas including Atlantis, The Ocean Club, and British Colonial Hilton.

In September of 2019, the Bahamas was hit by Hurricane Dorian, the strongest hurricane they’ve ever seen and one of the strongest Atlantic hurricanes on record. The hurricane devastated the northernmost islands, especially the Abaco Islands and Grand Bahama island. Fortunately, the Central and South Central Bahamas regions were not impacted, however, many consumers remained wary about Bahamas travel.

Since tourism is vital to the Bahamas economy, it was crucial that NPIPB restore consumer confidence and quickly entice tourists to visit Nassau.

Objective

Use the remainder of 2019 to recover and stabilize conversions (partner hotel linkouts) and website visits to meet prior year performance

Implementation

We paused NPIPB’s paid media on August 30th, 2019 as Hurricane Dorian was set to make landfall on September 1st. By September 13th, we launched NPIPB’s recovery campaign.

The campaign centered around a PSA video which we deployed in TrueView, Facebook, and later in Addressable TV. We supported the PSA messaging in Search, Display, and Social without cannibalizing traffic to high conversion rate pages.

News about the Bahamas continued to circulate and drive large amounts of unqualified traffic, and conversion rates from our Brand campaigns dropped. As NPIPB’s brand, The Bahamas, was directly tied to the hurricane, we had to pivot our efforts from Brand to Category. Instead of location, we focused on targeting consumer interests, competitor destination efforts – going as far as breaking out display efforts for every competitor destination- and vertical keywords (“resorts” and “vacations”).

Results

With our quick pivots and targeting optimizations in paid media, we helped NPIPB recover conversions and site visitations much quicker than expected. As a result, we not only met our campaign objective of catching 2018 performance, but exceeded it; at the end of 2019, conversions were up +5% YOY and website visitation was up +19% YOY on flat spend, surpassing the client’s annual visitation goal set at the beginning of the year.