Services Used
- Paid Social
- Paid Media
- Content
The Challenge
Out of Africa Wildlife Park is an outdoor safari-themed park located in Arizona. Seasonality plays a huge factor in the fluctuation of ticket sales, considering the park’s location in the desert heat of Camp Verde, AZ. Certain months of the year are consistently “hot” for ticket sales, but getting people through the door during colder months is a much more challenging endeavor.
Combating seasonality trends, our goal was to design an evergreen digital strategy to keep online sales consistent, if not increased. We would do this through building brand awareness, nurturing both new and existing site visitors as well as providing upsell opportunities on different experience and encounters available at the park. We leveraged the visually engaging identity of their brand through the Facebook Advertising and Google Display Remarketing networks to achieve this.
The Strategy
First, we needed to understand the monthly trends in terms of year-over-year ticket sales revenue. Noticing consistent trends in certain months such as March, June, October and December, we knew that we had to focus on building brand awareness and driving new users to the Out of Africa website during other months.
We integrated Facebook, AdWords and Content to put the right message in front of our target audience. Our objective was serve the most appropriate message to the most appropriate audience, at the right stage in the buyer’s journey. Considering the highly visual and interactive nature of the brand, we had the ability to create compelling ad imagery and copy.
We designed our strategy to run parallel with the site visitor’s position in the buyer’s journey (for example, new users were in the “awareness” stage) and utilized remarketing tactics to nurture these users through the cycle. In months where ticket sales were historically slow, we would keep the Out of Africa brand top of mind and engaged with its existing users through Facebook and Google ads.
Taking this into consideration, we focused our attention on driving new users to the website in “cold” months, with the knowledge that these users will continually be nurtured through our tiered Facebook ads strategy. We created a quiz that was non-branded but interesting and exciting enough to capture the user’s attention on Facebook and take them to our site as “cold” or “new” traffic. Once the user visited the website, they then had the liberty explore the various pages and programs that Out of Africa had to offer.
However, understanding that taking a quiz did not equal ticket sales, we developed a tiered strategy that would remarket users based on the various pages that they visited, including the quiz page. We also had the ability to remarket users based on their quiz outcomes, adding an extra level of personalization to the ads they were seeing, which we typically see result in higher CTR and on-site transactions across the board.
Using Facebook’s variety of ad formats such as the Carousel to showcase the different in-park programs and compelling photography through Newsfeed ads, we would finally send highly qualified users to the ticketing page to complete a purchase. On Google, we would run remarketing ads with creative that was specific to the pages the users had previously visited, with a pathway to the ticketing page as well. This way, all users had the potential to see an Out of Africa ad on both the Google and Facebook networks and the opportunity to make an online ticket purchase.
Bucketing all non-converted users into these remarketing campaigns across two networks helped us drive high revenue numbers with greater efficiency. The quiz, among other popular programs were used to progressively drive new “cold traffic” users to the site, and in “warmer” or “hot” months, we saw an increase in ticket sales in terms of volume and revenue as a result due to our remarketing efforts in nurturing those who were already aware of Out of Africa to the purchase point.
324%
- Return on Ad Spend Over 8 Month Campaign
321%
- Overall ROAS on Facebook
243%
- Overall ROAS on GDN
192%
- YOY Comparison in Most Popular Month
$88,402.29
- Overall Revenue
The Results
Over an 8-month campaign period with three “hot” months in between, we saw an overall ROAS of 324% across both the Facebook and Google channels.
For Facebook advertising, the ROAS was 321% across the 8-month term. We knew our tiered strategy was an evergreen one when we started seeing higher revenue year over year even in slower months. In Out of Africa’s most popular month, the ROAS on Facebook was 1002%, leaving last year’s revenue in the same month out in the dust at an increase of 2619% in revenue.
In it’s lifetime, the quiz reached 282,000 unique individuals and drove 20,192 new users to the Out of Africa’s website at an average CPC of $0.17. As the campaigns matured over time, the quiz achieved a 10.24% CTR and a CPC as low as $0.05. Retargeting ads that typically hover around $1.10 CPC dropped as low as $0.68. We were also able to integrate other Out of Africa campaigns into our strategy, making it a dynamic ecosystem of ads and campaigns that matured and built off each other.
On Google, over the same 8-month time-frame we saw a ROAS of 243%. We drove a total of $11,367.79 in the form of bottom-line revenue, on an aggregate of $4,675 in total ad spend. The reason we saw so much effectiveness in terms of driving this revenue is because we left the cold outreach to Facebook, where we can use more engaging content like quizzes etc. as a first touch point and brand introducer to first get users to the website. From there, Google was able to retarget those already warm leads through its robust remarketing abilities, which is why we were able to more than double ad spend in the form of revenue during this 8-month time frame.
