Attraction Marketing Using Google
Brunel’s SS Great Britain
Brunel’s SS Great Britain is Bristol’s number one visitor attraction and a top 10 UK museum (TripAdvisor 2022). It is home to the world’s first great ocean liner, the SS Great Britain, the Being Brunel museum, and the Brunel Institute, which houses one of the world’s finest maritime and Brunel collections. The charity that manages and maintains Brunel’s SS Great Britain and collections is the SS Great Britain Trust.
SS Great Britain Trust
The SS Great Britain Trust is the charity that runs Brunel’s SS Great Britain and the Brunel Institute, caring for the SS Great Britain on behalf of the nation along with collections comprising 70,000 objects and artefacts in the two museums and the archives. The charity runs community engagement programmes and specialist education programmes that inspire future generations of engineers, helping to address inequality and barriers into engineering and STEM careers.
Brief
Brunel’s SS Great Britain originally came to Strange to fix their struggles with deploying their Google Ads Grant budget and effectively acquiring ticket transactions from their digital marketing activity.
Approach
The first step to increasing budget deployment was to do an account-wide audit looking for opportunities to increase spend. From this, we found that the current account structure was inefficient and so we developed a more granular campaign structure. We extensively researched new keywords and added generic terms that we knew worked well due to previous experience advertising attractions. We also added a new campaign using keywords relevant to products being sold in their online store, allowing us to provide further reach and a secondary revenue stream.
At the same time, we rebuilt all conversion tracking in order to accurately record the effects of the increased spend. Crucially, the new conversions included how much each ticket transaction was worth – allowing Google’s machine learning to optimise towards bidding for users likely to buy more tickets.
After our actions in the Grant account led to such a strong performance, we launched paid activity. Despite Google Grant providing a $10,000 budget for free, they cannot appear above paid ads or spend over $2.00 on a keyword bid. Having set the Grant campaigns up first, we had the best keyword research available and knew exactly which keywords to bid on. Furthermore, paid and Grant accounts can never compete against one another, so if the paid account has used up its budget for the day or there is a keyword we don’t want to bid real money on – the Grant account can still serve ads.
The other advantage of using a paid account is the ability to create display campaigns. We used prospecting campaigns that targeted people similar to those who had searched for our most valuable keywords and re-marketing campaigns that targeted people who had previously visited the website but had not purchased a ticket.
Result
We were able to deliver significant performance improvements from month 1 of our engagement including;
- 48.5% increase in Grant spend YoY.
- 50% increase in Grant ticket transactions in peak trading period.
- Significant improvements in the Paid Account perfomance with the ROAS achieving 11+.
Testimonial
The team at Strange are excellent. They’ve worked hard to understand our challenges and rework our Google Grant and PPC accounts to deliver much improved performance, plan an awareness strategy that’s helped us reach new markets and consult with us on our social marketing strategy. They’re a trusted extension to the team and their broader travel and tourism marketing knowledge is great to have.
Let's chat. Tell us a bit about your project.
If you prefer to speak with someone, call 01202 203160 or if you'd like to book a 30 min meeting to see if we can help just let us know and we'll arrange a call with one of our Directors.