The challenge
A small independent ski and snowboard rental shop in Queenstown, New Zealand. Winter is rental season. In summer the whole business switches over to other outdoor activities, so the rental year is compressed into a few months and every season effectively starts from scratch.
Queenstown is a hard market for an independent to be found in. There are bigger rental chains, the rental desks up at the resorts, and tour and accommodation operators bundling gear into packages. Anyone shopping around has plenty of options in front of them, and most of them are not in Queenstown yet when they start looking. They are at home, planning a ski trip, and the shop needed to be in front of them at that moment.
What we did
The measurement came first. Google Tag Manager on the site, Google Analytics with ecommerce tracking behind it, so every online booking could be traced back to the search, the campaign and the ad that earned it. That is the only reason the numbers below are facts rather than estimates.
Then Search campaigns across both markets, structured so we could always see what each part was worth:
- Separate Australia and New Zealand campaigns, budgeted and bid independently
- Brand kept apart from non-brand, so we always knew what the non-brand work returned on its own
- Dynamic Search Ads pointed at the shop's own pages, which in 2019 was the cheapest way to catch the long tail of gear, size and package searches nobody would think to write keywords for
- Automated bidding on the campaigns with enough conversion data to train it, manual bidding on the rest
- Negative keyword work throughout, because ski rental searches pull in people wanting to buy, book lessons or get a repair done
The campaign ran from 22 February to the end of September 2019.
The results
NZ$17,200 of ad spend produced NZ$81,513 in online bookings, a return of 4.7 times. That came from 9,629 clicks and 606 tracked conversions, at an average of NZ$28 each. The click-through rate across the account was 15.2%, where 5% is usually considered good.
Two things in the split matter more than the headline number.
The first is where the money came from. Australian traffic returned 6.2 times its spend. New Zealand returned 2.2 times. Australia took 63% of the budget and produced 83% of the revenue. That is the shape of a Queenstown winter: the most valuable customer is the Australian booking a trip weeks ahead, gear included, before getting on the plane. Domestic customers tend to decide later and closer to the mountain, where the shop is competing on convenience and price against everyone else in town.
The second is brand against non-brand. Brand searches returned 11 times, which is what brand searches do, and they took less than a sixth of the budget. Non-brand took the other 84% and still returned 3.6 times. That is people who did not know the shop existed, at a return worth building a season on.
The best of the non-brand work was Dynamic Search Ads in Australia: NZ$2,540 of spend, NZ$15,320 back, six times over, on the cheapest clicks in the account. Read that as a 2019 tactic rather than a recommendation. Google has changed a great deal since, Dynamic Search Ads matter far less than they did, and we go after that same long tail differently now.
Alongside the online bookings, the ads brought in 118 phone calls, 86 email enquiries and 201 requests for directions to the shop. None of that revenue is in the 4.7 times, because it was not tracked to a value. The real return was higher. We said at the time that we could not prove by how much, and we still will not put a number on it.
There was also headroom left. The account held 45% of the impressions available to it, losing 36% on ad rank and 18% on budget. The New Zealand non-brand campaign alone lost half its impressions to budget. Our recommendation for 2020 was more budget behind what was already working, plus remarketing and a wider brand-awareness push. That season never came. Australia's border closed in March 2020, and the Australian market, the part of this account doing most of the work, was gone for two years.
Seven years on
This is one of the earliest seasons we ran ads in ski and snowboard rental. Paid search on its own, with the tracking built underneath it to prove what it earned.
What started here has grown into a full blueprint since, across every channel: Google Ads, organic search and content, and email. The tactics have moved on a long way, and they should have. Google is a different platform now, so are the booking systems these shops run on, and so is the way people research a trip.
The principle underneath has not moved. The out-of-town customer, planning the trip and booking gear before they travel, is worth several times the one deciding locally. Get found by that person early, measure what they are worth, and an independent shop can take share from operators with much bigger budgets.
That is what you get if you work with us on a rental business: over seven years with clients in this industry, and seven years of data and learning to draw on, across New Zealand, the United States and Europe. Every market is slightly different. The principles remain the same.