Maley helps Hawaiian boat and snorkel adventure firm to take their first steps into PPC marketing

Manta Adventures is a family firm based in Kailua-Kona, a small vacation destination town on the west coast of Hawaii Island (the Big Island). Manta Adventures specialises in running daily private family fishing and snorkel trips alongside seasonal Whale Watching.

A GREAT WEBSITE WITH 5-STAR REVIEWS NEEDED MORE IMPETUS TO INCREASE SALES

Manta were completely new to paid search campaigns. They have a great website with 5-star reviews that ranks fairly well in SEO terms, but they wanted to push their online bookings further and secure more sales. PPC was the logical route take.

Daily snorkel trips are the bread & butter of Manta’s business, and the highlight of their trips is the night time Manta Snorkelling which is the best time of day to get up close to the Manta Rays.

SPECIFIC TARGETING WITH THE ADS WAS ESSENTIAL TO CAPITALISE ON THIS UNIQUE HAWAIIAN EXPERIENCE

In order to grow the revenue for their night time Manta Ray Snorkel trips, we created an array of very specifically targeted campaigns to capture as much of the available impressions as possible. This was Manta Adventures’ top selling experience that attracted incredible 5-star reviews, so we knew the conversion rates would be good, and indeed the results validated our instincts on this.

We also had to get more bookings for the daytime family trips. These are not as specific as the Manta Ray ads, so we had to create campaigns targeting generic snorkel trips.

SEASONAL WHALE WATCHING CAMPAIGNS WERE ADDED INTO THE MIX

Whale Watching is also a very popular leisure activity in Hawaii. After a few months on the Manta Ray and general snorkelling campaigns, we created some new ads for the Whale Watching as it came into season. In ad cost terms, the Whale Watching conversions were much more expensive than the snorkel trips but the revenue from these trips was much higher in value. Because of the higher value, we felt it was viable to pay a higher cost per click and maintain a higher average position for this campaign than we were willing to with the other services.

We broke down each of the key services into separate campaigns with specific ad groups to target more specific variants of the keywords, such as activity types through to different locations. Each of these ad groups include ads that are specific to those keywords, with dynamic keyword insertions tested on at least one out of the three ads that were initially set live.

MANTA’S STRONG WEBSITE MADE IT IDEAL FOR DSA CAMPAIGNS

The client’s website was very strong with lots of high quality content. So we set up a DSA campaign. Through DSA campaigns, Google are often able to find well converting keywords or keyword groups that you may not have included in the standard campaigns. This approach proved to be a success, with the DSA campaign providing the majority of conversions in the initial stages until we then replaced the most successful keywords from the DSA campaigns into regular search campaigns.

CAMPAIGN RESULTS GENERATE CONSISTENT SALES ALL YEAR ROUND WITH MINIMAL SEASONAL FLUCTUATIONS

In our first year with Manta Adventures, we were able to increase the average monthly sales by 18.5%. Since then we have increased sales through PPC by 29%. This has been achieved while maintaining a similar monthly budget with only minor seasonal fluctuations. The client is also pleased that the average cost of new customer acquisition has decreased by 22%

We continue to work with Manta Adventures and are consistently striving to improve the amount of bookings that come through PPC whilst reducing the cost per booking.