Case Study

Exceptional Execution Earns 16X Return for Dawn Ranch

Dawn Ranch is a creative retreat situated on 22 spectacular acres along Northern California’s Russian River. Distinctive luxury destinations like these require carefully executed marketing campaigns to not only attract guests, but do so efficiently and at scale. We were able to leverage Google’s advanced capabilities across pay-per-click search and Performance Max to exceed expectations.

Exceptional Execution Earns 16X Return for Dawn Ranch
16% Clickthrough Rate
$.68 Cost-Per-Click
16.32-to-1 Return on Ad Spend

The Background

A short drive from San Francisco into the heart of wine country, and adjacent to an ancient redwood grove, Dawn Ranch embodies the essence of California’s natural beauty. Its accommodations range from glamping tents to cabins to bungalows, each designed to surround guests in quiet, mindful retreat. With inspirational programming throughout the year, and food and spa experiences drawing from the best the region has to offer, this resort is wholly unique. For hotel and resort marketers, this introduces opportunities and challenges.

The Challenge

The health of any luxury hotel or resort business relies on predictable revenue. And in this business, OSAs like Expedia increasingly claim a piece for unprepared venues. For a luxury bungalow rental, this percentage can add up to a significant sum of lost revenue. Our marketing challenge was clear: establish this brand among browsers showing strong intent, and maintain its position in search results, ahead of OSAs and competitors. 

In other words, when someone types a phrase like “luxury cabins russian river,” we want Google to focus our Dawn Ranch campaigns on that individual.

The Solution

O’Rourke’s marketing team set out to drive highly qualified customers seeking to connect with the natural beauty of the region straight to the Dawn Ranch booking engine. 

We settled on campaigns integrated within the Google Ads platform, segmented by customer intent, from those doing broad research to comparing options to beginning the booking process.

  • Google Search Ads
      • Branded Terms
      • Non-branded terms, broken out by funnel position
      • Sitelinks and other relevant extensions claim additional SERP space
  • Google Performance Max
    • Text, Video, and Image Placements
    • Automated audience and bidding

Step one: protect the brand with a brand-name PPC search campaign. By bidding on “dawn ranch” and related search terms, we were able to maintain top-of-page position in Google search. Sitelinks and other search extensions served to enrich the paid result, which also occupies more valuable real estate and pushes competitors and OSAs down the page. 

Further non-branded search campaigns seek to capture interest and intent for high-propensity guests, bidding on terms related to stays in the Russian River region, cabin rentals, and glamping. Ongoing work removes search terms that don’t convert, and optimizes underperforming ad copy. 

We then turned to Google’s powerful Performance Max platform, which is increasingly used for hotel marketing campaigns to drive a range of outcomes. Performance Max works from sets of creative assets, creating automated placements across websites, YouTube, Gmail, and other pages. By giving it clear guidelines and campaign goals, it was able to quickly optimize toward the users most likely to click and book, learning from each successful interaction. 

Taken together, an outstanding 16% of ad impressions received clicks, and bookings followed, totaling more than 16X return on ad spend.

How We Made It Happen

Interested in putting Google’s robust marketing tools to work for your hotel? Drop us a line any time.

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