Testing Google Ads for an RV Campground

Recently I ran a pilot Google Ads campaign for a new client, an RV campground.

Neither my client nor I have much experience in the hospitality business. He bought the campground as an investment. I haven't had hospitality clients since COVID, when most of them went bankrupt.

So the goal was to spend a small amount, gather data, and see what actually happens.

The headline numbers

Here’s what happened in the first 14 days of the pilot campaign.

We always track leads from first click all the way through the funnel. That's the only way to get the truth about how useful the ads are.

On the surface the results looked reasonable. But the data got interesting when I dug a little deeper.

A few bookings produced most of the revenue

Most bookings were low value. The median booking was only $131.

But a few longer stays produced the bulk of the revenue.

• 7 bookings produced about 70% of the revenue.
• The other 30 bookings produced the remaining 30%.

This changes how I'm going to structure the account going forward.

When I launch a pilot campaign I optimise for legitimate lead volume. (Real enquiries from humans, no spam.) It’s the right approach early on when we know nothing about the market.

But Google repeats what you reward. If you tell it the goal is lead volume, it tries to get lead volume, not money.

And we want money.

There are two obvious moves at this stage:

• Keep the conversion-based bidding strategy but change the primary conversion to qualified leads.
• Or change to a value-based bidding strategy.

Optimising for qualified leads usually improves results. And 72 qualified leads in just over two weeks is enough volume to make it work.

But in this case a qualified lead isn't a great signal.

• Someone stopping for one night on a road trip is qualified.
• So is someone planning a month-long stay.

But one booking might be worth $41 and the other $950.

Optimising for qualified leads should improve lead quality, but it will still favour lead volume rather than lead value.

That leaves value-based bidding.

This is where you ask Google to optimise for booking value instead of lead volume.

In theory it should work well. But I don't think we have enough data yet.

The pilot campaign produced 37 bookings in just over two weeks, which sounds like a healthy number. But most of those bookings were low value. Only eight bookings were higher than the average, with seven accounting for most of the revenue.

Google learns from patterns. With only a handful of high-value bookings, the system won't have enough info yet.

Google Ads would be a lot less stressful if the next move was always clear. Today it isn’t.

Matching cost per lead with value per lead

What we’d really like to do is match what we pay per lead with the value of that lead. Pay less for people wanting short stays and, if we have to, pay more do for people planning longer stays.

Since Google can’t reliably identify that difference yet, I’m going to give it some hints.

I'm going to split the pilot campaign into three separate campaigns:

• Expected high value
• Expected low value
• The original campaign

Some searches suggest that the lead might turn into a higher value booking. Phrases like “long stay rv park” or “monthly rv park”. Unfortunately there isn’t much search volume for these, but they’ll go into the high value campaign.

I'm guessing that someone searching for phrases like “near me” or “last minute” is probably passing through and not likely to stay long. I could be wrong, but I’m going to test it by putting these into the low value campaign.

Everything else stays in the original campaign.

I'll lower the Target CPA and budget on the low value campaign and raise them on the high value campaign.

Will this work?

I don't know.

Sometimes the best we can do is come up with a reasonable hypothesis and test it.

While we’re testing the campaign structure, I’m also working on something else that usually improves results.

Our click-to-sale data showed:

• 14 leads weren't contacted.
• 17 leads went cold after the campground sent them a price.

That’s 31 leads where the advertising cost has already been paid, but the opportunity hasn’t been fully worked.

With other clients I’ve often been able to recover bookings from leads like these using a short series of follow-up emails.

• One series for leads we couldn't contact.
• Another series to follow up on quotes.

More on this here if you're interested.

Once this is set up it usually runs automatically in the background. That makes it worth doing even if it only recovers a small percentage of otherwise lost leads.

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