Kata Adventures is a boutique company, situated in the beautiful Bovec, offering active vacations and one-day adventures. It is made up of a group of adrenaline junkies, led by the energetic and cheerful Katja. Their offer encompasses everything from simple daily activities, such as cycling, hiking and walking down the clear river Soča, to more adventurous activities that get your blood pumping, such as rafting, canyoning and parachute jumping.
The business model of Kata Adventures primarily focuses on foreign visitors who are spending their vacation in Slovenia. The majority of clients comes from the UK, the Czech republic and the Netherlands. With the intention of reaching its target audience in the selected European countries, Kata decided to address its audience with the help of Google ads.
It all starts with a strategy
As already discussed, the client wanted to get in touch with potential clients from nearby (and some not so nearby) European countries. Keeping that in mind, we prepared a strategy that would bring the right traffic to the client’s website; meaning all those who already know that they will be spending their summer vacation in Slovenia and who wish to spend it actively, be it with their family, partner or friends.
This meant that all campaigns had to be extremely narrowly focused and we had to pay special attention to the selection of our keywords, which also had to be narrowly focused if we wanted to avoid targeting all those Belgians, Czechs and Italians who were looking for canyoning or rafting in their own countries or in all other European countries but Slovenia.
Instead of using broad match keywords we resorted to phrase and exact match and thus avoided completely irrelevant searches that would bring the wrong traffic to the website and make us spend our budget completely unnecessarily on the wrong search terms. We quickly had our confirmation that we made the right decision, since the website was visited by people who were actually searching for adrenaline experience during their stay in Slovenia. During the period between 1st May and 31st August we even reached a 15% CTR (click-through rate; the ratio between impressions and clicks) in certain countries.
Besides search ads, which were reaching people who were already preparing themselves for their vacation in Slovenia, we also wanted to reach all those who were already in Slovenia and were looking for adrenaline experiences our client was offering. Therefore, we prepared a separate mobile campaign and again used only phrase and exact match keywords.
Despite running ads abroad and in Slovenia during high season for (adventurous) summer activities, we were able to achieve a favourable price, namely 0.79€ for all search campaigns (in Austria, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Ireland, Slovakia, the UK, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic) and 0.04€ for all display campaigns.
Let’s talk numbers…
In our case study, we focused on the period between 1st May and 31st August. So which are those numbers and metrics that we are especially proud of?
Since the client wasn’t tracking conversions before the start of our cooperation, we had to turn to the client herself for additional information. When compared with 2017, 2018 was more than successful. They reported:
- 100% increase in sales
- 100% increase in team members (from 3 to 6 members)
- They carried out 400 experiences and had 1900 guests, which makes for 4.75 guests per experience.
- The season lasted for 214 days (from 1st April until 31st October, 2018), which makes for 1.87 activities/day.
- From 1st January, 2018 until 31st December, 2018 they received around 300 inquiries, which makes for 0.87 inquiries per day. During the period of the main season (from 20th July until 20th August) they received 3 inquiries per day or 4 inquiries if you also count the phone calls.
- During our cooperation they successfully closed around 75% of all inquiries they got.
The success of the campaigns and, consequently, our client’s satisfaction show just how important it is to prepare a right – and in this case a narrowly focused – strategy, especially when entering foreign markets. This was the only way of making sure we use our budget wisely and rationally and, with it, reach the right target group.
Of course, we couldn’t advertise about our client’s services without testing them out for ourselves so a part of our Optiweb team decided to try canyoning in Fratarica. The experience was more than exhilarating and adrenaline packed!
Are you also faced with Google and Facebook campaigns that are simply not reaching the desired results, but don’t know what to do about it? Let’s get a cup of coffee and, together, we’ll make sure your ads are not only visible but also bring the desired results!
