Overview:
Travel Portland is the city of Portland’s official visitor’s bureau that operates a year-round visitor information center, and supports Portland’s hospitality industry. Due to Portland’s rainy climate, the fall season is a historically low revenue generating time for Portland hotels, restaurants and other tourist attractions. By partnering with Travel Portland, hotels were able to offer travelers discounted rates and $50 cash upon checking in. Anvil collaborated on this multi-channel marketing initiative by managing online PPC efforts with both search and display marketing across major search engines and social media sites.
Objective:
Increase hotel booking revenue through Travel Portland’s site. Support online PR efforts and marketing channels by providing paid ads for branded terms to facilitate easy access to hotel booking options.
Challenge:
Not only was Travel Portland and Anvil Media working against natural desires to flee Portland in the rainy fall season, agreements with the partner hotel properties made it so that Anvil could not target hotel names or use them in the ads themselves.
Strategy:
Anvil relied heavily on a creative mix of PPC keywords and highly targeted ad groups to maintain a cost effective CPC. Anvil used a two-part strategy of boosting ad position while simultaneously testing high-converting ad copy to both increase impressions and click-through-rate.
Results:
The promotion ran for two months and saw a 242% return on ad spend for the duration of the campaign. Compared to this time last year, Travel Portland’s revenue from the Perks campaign increased 192% with click-through-rates increasing by 229%.
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