Visit Santa Cruz County Achieves Expanded “Shoulder Season” Tourism with 318% Y/Y Growth in Referrals to Partner Sites at 84% Lower CPA With Performance Max

Industry: B2C

TERRENCE CONCANNON
CEO
VISIT SANTA CRUZ COUNTY
“Sage Digi brings the newest ad technology to the table each week and enables our team to learn and grow with the market. They’re consistently attentive to our goals and work within our budget parameters. We definitely recommend working with Sage Digi.”

Summary

Visit Santa Cruz County (VSCC) is a private, non-profit corporation, serving as the official visitor marketing entity for Santa Cruz County. Spring season (March to May) is a “shoulder” season for tourism in Santa Cruz County. With searches being lower than peak season, VSCC’s aim was to tap into user behavior signals and proactively reach customers across diverse touchpoints, while optimizing spend. With a strategic shift to Performance Max, we helped VSCC see a 318% Y/Y increase in referrals to partner sites at 84% lower CPAs.

Needs & Goals

With demand tapering off during Spring, VSCC sought a solution from Sage to proactively find and convert any available demand across multiple channels, while growing VSCC partner traffic at lower CPA and CPC.

How We Did It

Our conversion-focused strategy tracked outbound clicks to partner websites from the VSCC website via PMax ad clicks. We identified new, high-converting audience segments who were ready to make travel plans, enabled by a robust P-Max strategy. These audiences can be missed only using keyword-based search campaigns. We leveraged the full spectrum of Google’s ad inventory through strategically structured P-Max campaigns, utilizing the newest AI-enabled technologies. This resulted in Y/Y traffic and conversion growth for Visit Santa Cruz County!

We achieved

318% Yr/Yr referral traffic to partner websites – By executing a strategic pivot from conventional search campaigns to Google’s Performance Max, we empowered VSCC to significantly grow engaged tourism traffic (those interested in traveling to Santa Cruz County). With performance max’s AI-driven efficiency, we ensured that we intelligently directed ad spend to capture all available demand, across Google’s ecosystem, rather than ad spend being wasted on channels with low returns.

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Y/Y CPA Reduction

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Y/Y CPC Reduction

Customer service

☆☆☆☆☆
★★★★★

Performance

☆☆☆☆☆
★★★★★

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