Filling Indigenous boat tours using pay-per-click ads
We worked with Sea Wolf Adventures since they began in 2012, from creating their website to maintaining and supporting their online booking system and multilingual site functionality. Over the course of six years we also promoted their business as they’ve grown, and helped them achieve the prized Signature Experience status from Destination Canada. In 2017, they doubled their capacity and asked us for help filling seats for their amazing grizzly bear, wildlife and cultural boat tours.
What we did
Having already implemented search engine optimization (SEO) on specific landing pages for their boat tours, we had ideal pages to start with. So instead, we focused on the next step for lead generation: carefully crafting a Google Ads campaign to target the geographic markets and customer demographics they helped us identify. Once this was set-up, and we started sending paid traffic their way, we further optimized the site for organic rankings with new keyword research and content.
Tools and techniques
- Keyword research and strategy
- On-going SEO
- Conversion tracking
- PPC set-up and maintenance
We saw results immediately and continued daily A/B testing, search and negative keyword maintenance and constant ad adaptation to respond to what we were seeing as the market saw and interacted with our campaign.
The results
As tourism on Vancouver Island is very competitive, we started with a Google Ads test using a small budget for set-up and maintenance time. Within days, conversion tracking between Adwords, the Sea Wolf Adventures website, and Bokun (a tourism booking platform) showed that bookings were being made from Google Ads. After seeing a clear return, we decided to double the budget and maintenance time, which resulted in even more conversions.