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MORE Accountable Media

Bridging The Gap Between Offline Data and Performance

Justin Russell & Grant Zerbe
September 27, 2024

Net Conversion develops a process to feed Holiday Inn Club Vacations’ offline sale data to Google’s media platform to allow for deeper insights.

Holiday Inn Club Vacations (HICV) is a leader in affordable travel accommodations nationwide in the United States. Their properties are specifically known for creating lasting memories for family vacationers with a variety of experiences of their choice in over 25+ destinations.

During the pandemic in 2020, while many travel and hospitality brands pulled back on their marketing efforts, HICV instead made it their mission to increase the effectiveness of their media by advancing their analytics and reporting. By prioritizing the use of their first party data and closing the gap between online and offline data, we were able to better guide strategic decisions and optimizations to reach HICV’s business goal.

Throughout the pandemic for HICV Packages, the goal was to drive qualified package sales, with a secondary goal of them then turning into timeshare owners. The problem the team was facing was that through our digital media channels, the most bottom-funnel conversion KPI available to track was leads, as the package sales happen offline through their sales team.

Given that we are an analytics-first company, we saw this as an opportunity to make a serious impact on performance.

Objective

  • Create a process that would connect HICV’s offline package sale data to Google’s media platform to allow for deeper insights and optimization
  • Drive qualified package sales and time-share purchases

Project small image
Project small image

Implementation

To be able to optimize toward the conversions that matter most to HICV, we imported offline package sale conversions from HICV’s CRM platform (Salesforce) into Google by using an API connection to Conversionomics, our internal warehouse, as the bridge to store and filter the data.

Conversionomics is Net Conversion’s proprietary, data extraction and transformation platform, allowing us to connect to any data source, process complex data sets and export for near real-time reporting. Conversionomics processes +5 TB of data per day, with 5,800+ individual data sources, performing 1,500+ transformations, powering 660+ dashboards.  In 2021, Conversionomics was recognized by Google Cloud as a top-of-the-line data automation and aggregation tool for leveraging the power of BigQuery to help marketing and advertising teams centralize data, streamline reporting and deliver insights that drive Google campaign performance.

By using this tool, Net Conversion was able to close the online to offline gap in marketing analytics. With Conversionomics’ internal API ability, we are able to create efficient, clean data sets in a matter of minutes to then be uploaded into digital social media ad platforms. However, since this data does not come through their website, but rather a CRM program (Salesforce) to accumulate their data, it is almost impossible to attribute digital media efforts to sales or conversions. Which is where the true challenge lies and how Conversionomics solves the technological issue of making the data available to import into Google Ads.

For this particular case, Net Conversion imported offline conversions from HICV CRM (Salesforce) into Google Ads to be used across Search to maximize performance  goals downstream. After this importation into the Google conversions tool, Net Conversion applied tiered values to each step of the conversion funnel; increasing in value from the initial lead to package sale to timeshare sale. This step accomplished alerting the algorithm of the most valued actions a consumer can take with their business. In order to then allow the Google algorithm to efficiently use the full suite of data now being ingested, the campaign structure was then consolidated from 13 separate search campaigns into only 4, while simultaneously broadening the reach of the campaign by launching broad match, travel related keywords. To allow for an ease of the initial lead generation conversion, we implemented Google Lead Form Extensions within each campaign that will autofill a users information if they’re ready to convert, while still allowing the user to have the option of clicking through the main search ad to learn more on the site to then submit a web lead. Both lead conversions were valued the same to show they were equal actions in the funnel.

These consolidated campaigns were then set to bid on a Max Conversion Value bidding strategy to take the pseudo-funnel into account when bidding within each auction, bidding more aggressively on the users who had a higher propensity to complete the full funnel after submitting the initial lead form.  By doing this we were able to combine Google’s automation technologies across bidding, budget optimization, audiences, creative and lead generation attribution model. With this data, we were able to give offline conversion a larger value in our attribution model, to optimize towards a highly qualified lead vs. volume of leads.

Results

With Google Campaign Consolidation, Google Automated Bidding, and Google Cloud recognized Conversionomics all working hand in hand, we were able to ingest consumer leads data, manipulate the data, push offline import into Google and derive efficient optimizations and audience specific strategies for our client. With the additional information, we are able to derive insights and create top-notch qualified leads as well as ensure such leads are aligning with our audience-specific strategies based on consumer actions prior to lead submission.

Upon implementation, we saw an immediate increase in conversion rate. Once we implemented the Offline Conversionomics Import x Google Consolidated campaigns structure, while scaling paid efforts substantially (+4.5x in Spend) the client was able to drive a +1ppt increase in Lead to Package Conversion Rate and drive +2.3x more Package Sales, seeing the highest lift in the most down-funnel, highest quality sales (Timeshare Sales) at +5.3x for the brand YoY.

From here we are hopeful to include creative targeting testing based on types of accommodations and consumer journeys demands to increase our strategy personalization, while continuing to fill the gaps in the steps to the true conversion (timeshare sales) by importing and valuing each conversion checkpoint from their CRM to arm the Google algorithm with the true nature and behavior of the highest quality audiences.

+2.3x

Package Sales

+5.3x

Timeshare Sales

+1ppt

Lead to Package Conversion Rate

+4.5x

Spend