Case Study Water Park - Ramayana

Intro

In 2015, we started working with the largest water park in Thailand “Ramayana”. The water park is 18.4 hectares in area with 21 attractions, swimming pools, a beach, and bars – everything vacationers could need 🌴. Our job was to work on attracting customers and increasing ticket sales.

Initial Data

• Client’s website – ramayanawaterpark.com
• Advertising system – Google Ads
• CRM-client system

We carried out the work gradually:

After discussing the goals of the project with the client and receiving the completed brief, we have formed the final objectives – not just to attract new clients, but to make the park into something recognizable. In other words, the goal was to implement a competent PR strategy while taking into account the Thai cultural characteristics. An important milestone was the launch of Enhanced Ecommerce, an enhanced e-commerce solution that helped match advertising costs to actual water park sales.

Objectives

The entertainment industry 🎉 has its own characteristics, so emotions and visualization are important here. But even when dealing with emotions, it’s important to remember the ROI, which illustrates the return on investment. Based on this, we set ourselves the following objectives:

• Setting up Google Ads search advertising
• Launching advertising in Display Network Google Ads
• Launching video ads on YouTube
• Linking Google Analytics with the water park’s CRM

Actions Taken

After we received information about the target audience from the client, we decided to broadcast advertisements in Russian, English, and Thai. We set a character limit and got a translator involved in the project, who was provided with ads in English and key phrases.

Since the Thai alphabet uses diacritic marks, which can be written above or below the letters, this increases the number of characters and symbols and eats up the volume of the ad text. Given these nuances, we preferred ad adaptation rather than using literal translation.

Implementation

Ad Settings

Search Ads and Display Networks were adjusted for branded and targeted queries.

Branded establishments were able to oust other establishments from the top spot that promote the Ramayana brand. At the same time, we carried out an analysis and found out that brand queries overlap in organic search results and in PPC advertising by no more than 30%.

Dynamic insertion of a targeted query into an ad, the quality, and relevance of landing pages resulted in a CTR above 15% and a keyword quality score above 7.

Some of the campaigns were set up only for screenings in Thailand, some were broadcast all over the world 🌎 for English and Russian-speaking audiences. And for brand awareness, we launched a video ad on YouTube.

In order to minimize non-target traffic, we did the following:

1. Set things up to exclude web traffic from children on YouTube ads
2. Added negative keywords related to the ancient Indian epic of the same name 📖 to brand queries.

Corporate Bidding Strategy

While working on the project, we used our own strategy for interacting with Google Ads:

• We started by manually setting an average bid to collect enough data to continue work on the project.
• After three days of displaying ads, we received an estimated bid from Google for impressions in the first three positions.
• Applied a bid for showing on 2-3 positions.
• We got enough clicks and conversions to launch a smart Target CPA. As a result, Google assigns a higher bid itself if it thinks the user will convert.

E-commerce

Our client’s goal was not just to increase ticket sales, but to increase profits. Therefore, we paid special attention to the return on advertising costs. And the Enhanced Ecommerce helped in this expansion.

Actions taken:

1. We connected Google Analytics with the water park’s CRM. The Client ID, which was assigned to a user who came through an advertisement, was saved in CRM. Together with the ID, information about the purchase made and its amount gets stored.
2. At the water park, the customer gets a bracelet, where all expenses are saved. The price of the ticket with all additional costs was also redirected to CRM and Google Analytics.
3. We got information about the profits from each client (whether they made a purchase online or offline), compared the data with advertising costs, and received the ROI value, which showed us the effectiveness of advertising in numerical terms. ROI = 230% (for March 2019)

Noticeable features of advertising in Thailand

Even with extensive experience in carrying out PPC advertising, we were faced with several new considerations:

• On the day the King of Thailand died, all advertising was banned, so we stopped all campaigns.
• Thais celebrate New Year 🎅 in April with a holiday called Songkran. During the holiday, mass events and parties are held throughout the country. The Ramayana water park was no exception, so we prepared a separate advertising campaign for the occasion.
• The geographic area of demand for the park varies depending on the season. The tourist season is smoothly replaced by the season of local clients. Budgets were allocated in accordance with these periods. During the tourist season, the budget was redistributed towards campaigns in Russian and English.

Results

The results of the advertising campaign fully met our expectations as well as the client’s 📈. We got high conversion rates and the client got profit growth. The average cost of attracting one customer was 133 THB, while their average spending was 4200 THB. The large demand for the park’s services and its recognition outside Thailand have become important indicators of the quality of the work carried out.

Conclusion

Working on Ramayana was really interesting and memorable for us. This was a project where we leveraged the maximum power of Google Ads from smart strategy to e-commerce. We used Google Analytics to combine desk data with actual purchases at the park. Ramayana has definitely expanded our work’s geographic range and introduced us to a new culture.

We’re no longer working with the client, our advertising campaigns have been stopped, but the e-commerce setup still works to the client’s benefit.