P.R. Campaign Reaches Its Destination

Case Study: GoToPuertoRico.com combines Sponsored Search and display ads to help double its site traffic

You’d think it would be easy to convince people to come to a Caribbean island with breathtaking beaches and luxury resorts—especially one that doesn’t require a passport or currency exchange. But with fierce competition from neighboring islands, the Puerto Rico Tourism Company is in a constant battle to gain the attention and reservations of mainland Americans.

Company overview
GoToPuertoRico.com is operated by The Puerto Rico Tourism Company, and aims to promote the island’s tourism offerings to potential travelers in the U.S. and other countries. It also works with Puerto Rico hotels, tour providers and other businesses to book travel directly on the site. Puerto Rico competes with islands such as Aruba, the Dominican Republic, the Bahamas and Bermuda for the same eyeballs and travel dollars.

The company had long relied upon television and print advertising, then began online advertising in July 2007 with banner ads on various websites. In early 2008, it was determined that expanding the company’s online advertising could help reach a computer-using, tech-savvy clientele. The company asked its agency, LIH Group, for ideas on how to increase traffic to the U.S. territory’s official travel site, GoToPuertoRico.com.

LIH turned to the one-two punch of Yahoo! Sponsored Search and display advertising. With help from Yahoo!’s expert sales team, this “P.R. campaign” shocked its media planners by immediately contributing to a doubling of site traffic, and a significant increase in hotel bookings.

Search comes first
“We had read studies that people are watching less TV and subscribing less to print publications,” says Carlos Rom, Media Buyer at LIH Group. “We needed new solutions for promoting the site, so we looked into different options for getting online. We determined that keyword-based search advertising would be the easiest and cheapest way to do this, and would give us a chance to cater to a bigger crowd. Yahoo! was one of the companies that had the best solutions for search advertising and other types of online advertising, so we opened our account with them.”

A Yahoo! account representative worked with Rom to create an expanded set of relevant keywords and separate campaigns for promotional angles, like “destination weddings” and “beach resorts.” The account was optimized to the keywords with the highest click-through rate, and monitored to make sure placement and traffic goals were being met.

Doubling up with display
The team soon saw that keywords like “tropical destinations,” “caribbean vacations,” “puerto rico beaches” and “san juan” were driving the bulk of the traffic. It was fairly easy to adapt these to a new set of graphical display ads—or “banner” ads—that would appear across the Yahoo! network to targeted users via Yahoo!’s My Display Ads. This product enables advertisers to easily create banner ads by adding text, logos, colors and images. The campaigns can be targeted, set to a monthly budget, and run across the Yahoo! network, a specific Yahoo! property, or the Right Media Exchange.

“Our Yahoo! rep talked to me about moving some budget to display ads, to increase impressions and campaign exposure,” says Rom. “In our case, the ads flashed photos of Puerto Rico scenery and activities, and promoted a $200 hotel discount that was only available by booking on our site.” The click-through rate on these ads was excellent, and drove substantial traffic in a short amount of time.

While all parties agreed the display ads were a great complement to the search ads, they found that some that drove the most traffic were the opposite of what was working with search. “One of our best-performing display ads promoted destination weddings,” says Rom. “But that was one of the lower-performing keywords in the search campaign—people just didn’t think to search for that.”

Powerful results
GoToPuertoRico.com’s search campaign launched April 11, 2008, with display ads launching shortly thereafter. Immediately, the company experienced a huge increase in traffic to the site. “We went from an average of 5,000 unique visits per day to an average of 5,500 in April and 6,500 in May and June,” remembers Celmarie Aviles, Interactive Marketing Officer at the Puerto Rico Tourism Company. “We even had a huge spike one day in June, with 8,670 unique visits.”

The company also measures success with the number of hotel bookings completed on the site, and here again, traffic from Yahoo! made a significant impact. “The combination of search and display ads on Yahoo! really satisfied our need to achieve an increase in website visits and bookings,” says Aviles. “The campaigns have been very successful in branding Puerto Rico on the Internet.”

Selling paradise
The Yahoo! Search Marketing and display ad combo turned out to be a package as pleasurable as those sold on the GoToPuertoRico.com site. “For the first time, we are truly competing on the Internet,” says Aviles.

“The Puerto Rico Tourism Company is very, very happy with the results,” says Rom. “Yahoo!’s sales team really takes ownership of the account, and it feels like they are working for us. No matter what clients I work with in the future, I will definitely use Yahoo!’s ad products for our marketing needs.”

Lessons Learned

• Display ads can catch people when they’re not necessarily thinking about a certain product or service (in this case, traveling to Puerto Rico), but viewing one enables the user to come back later via search and find consistent messaging. Repetition drives the message home.
• Promotional offers can be very powerful: GoToPuertoRico.com mentioned a $200 hotel booking discount in both its search and display ads, with excellent results.
• Display ads’ ability to present visual images is especially effective for companies selling an experience or a travel destination.
• Relevant keywords, separate campaigns to promote different promotions, and optimization is essential in a search marketing campaign.
  

— Jeff Hecox