Wye Marsh AdWords Management

The Wye Marsh is a 3,000 acre tourist destination that includes an amphibian and reptile display hall, hiking, biking and skiing trails, canoeing and kayaking routes, an observation tower and boardwalks, birds of prey display, education classroom, event facilities, gift shop, and naturalists on staff. It offers on-site educational programs that encourage stewardship of natural resources and hosts a minimum of eight major events each year, the largest one being their March Sweetwater Festival.

The Wye Marsh is a registered non-profit organization with a Google Not-for-Profit AdWords account that allows them to spend up to $120,450.00 a year with a maximum ad spend of $330.00 per day and a maximum Cost Per Click (CPC) of $2.00. The client acquired our PPC services to maximize the value of their free Google advertising dollars and increase turnout to events.

Our goals were to increase ad impressions and improve ad placement while decreasing costs by matching keywords across ad content, paid keywords, and landing page content. Recently, we launched focused ads for their March Sweetwater Festival.  

We determined paid keywords that garner the highest search volume in their target area including the GTA and most of southern Ontario. ‘Maple Syrup Festival’ receives significantly more search traffic than Sweetwater Festival and so we developed campaigns around the search phrase ‘Maple Syrup Festival’.

We created ads with well written, attractive, and keyword-loaded content including date, time, and festival information. Ads were maximized with campaign and ad group level ad extensions highlighting additional event details including location information and activity call-outs.

On an ongoing basis we duplicate these steps for all campaigns, run A/B testing, and analyze keywords regularly to continually improve the Wye Marsh’s account performance.

The Wye Marsh Sweetwater Festival campaign received 31,349 impressions and drove 1,251 visitors to the website during the two weeks leading up to the festival. Our targeted campaign achieved a 3.99% CTR (industry average is ~ 2.18%) with our top 10 keywords achieving CTRs between 15% and 50%. The average CPC for our keywords was $1.62 compared to data showing the industry average (for Maple Syrup Festival) at $3.11.

The event was a success and during the festival they served over 1,500 pancake breakfasts to visitors from all over southern ontario.