The Shore Kelowna – Selling Hospitality with Modern Marketing

About Project

The Shore is a modern apartment-hotel complex located in Kelowna, BC. Operated by Appelt Properties, they’re part of an exclusive group of mixed-use residential and premier medical office buildings across the country.
The Shore came to us for Google Ads in December 2020, concerned with their accounts performance. After reviewing their account, we discovered the targeting was too broad, leading to high impressions but low relevance. They were spending their budget in all the wrong places, something that we quickly helped to turn around.
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Google Ads
Whipping their ad account into shape.
Stray clicks from foreign countries, high clicks from kids apps, and lists of broad, irrelevant keywords were just some of what we found during our initial account review. After a much-needed cleanup, we developed a multi-tiered marketing strategy that included highly targeted ads and audiences. We worked with The Shore’s marketing team to determine where their guests were coming from and who their major competitors are.
Using keyword and competitor research, we built a content strategy that tied their Google Ads and blog content together. We analyzed user intent and search history to determine what people search for when booking a hotel, and the best way to get in front of them during those searches.
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Content Strategy
Laser-focused on location.
In building the content strategy, we knew that we were up against some marketing giants. Platforms like Booking.com and Expedia invest heavily in showing up in search, so our strategy had to take advantage of their main weakness – local expertise.
One of the factors in Google’s Quality Score, a metric that determines whether an ad will show for a search term, is relevancy. We worked to position The Shore as the most relevant choice for location-based searches, crafting targeted landing pages that matched each of our new ad groups.
We also worked on creating ads that targeted booking intent, rather than just direct searches for hotels. Users that search for cabins, cottages, vacation rentals, resorts, airbnbs & vrbos are all looking for the same thing: somewhere comfortable to rest their heads. While we can’t position The Shore in all of these categories, we can offer it as a great alternative. In a popular travel destination like Kelowna, this competitive positioning has made all the difference.
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Data-Driven Results
Because everyone loves a before & after.
When The Shore first came to us, their cost-per-action (CPA) was as high as $97.82 in October of 2020. We started making changes in December, and saw the CPA drop considerably.
BEFORE
Cost-Per-Action (CPA) > $90
Impression Share < 15% Click-Through-Rate (CTR) <0.5% AFTER Cost-Per-Action (CPA) < $10 Impression Share > 30%
Click-Through-Rate (CTR) >5%
And we haven’t stopped there. Each month we work on The Shore’s Google Ads account. We filter search terms, add and remove keywords, build out negative keywords lists and adjust ads based on performance. As of August 2022, we’re seeing an average CPA of $6.43, an impression share of 32.84%, and a CTR average of 5.08% (15.12% search & 2.54% display).
To date we’ve managed over $100,000 in ad spend and brought in over 15k leads for the company.
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Site Optimization & SEO
From building to booking.
Hospitality in the Okanagan is a seasonal business. While our seasons are mild and we’re lucky to have visitors all year long (thank you Big White Ski Resort), search volumes look different in July than in mid-February.
During slower seasons, we shift focus to organic growth and SEO. We started by conducting a comprehensive site audit to determine areas for improvement, and put together an action plan targeting the lowest-hanging fruit.
Some things we’ve worked on for The Shore include:
- Improving mobile pagespeed and core web vitals
- Fixing broken links and resolving chain redirects
- Site security improvements
- Conversion optimization & small website updates
- Page, category and tag optimization
- Optimizing images and image filenames
- Reviewing NAP citations and creating industry profiles
- Heat-mapping with HotJar
- Schema insertion & adding location-specific markup
Through consistency in publishing blog content (over 40 posts to date), on-page and off-page SEO, we’re seeing truly great results. We continue to modernize their website with minor changes over time, and have recently started a bi-monthly newsletter campaign to promote their blog content and seasonal promotions. According to MailChimp, the average open rate for the hotel industry is 10-20%. So far we're seeing an average open rate of 48.5%.