Go Ape Facebook and Instagram Advertising & Google PPC

• Advertising
• Branding
• Digital marketing
• Exhibitions & events
• Graphic design
• Marketing strategy
• Packaging
• Web design & SEO

Challenge

To improve the return on investment from Facebook and Instagram advertising, improve the performance of Google pay per click advertising (PPC) and boost corporate/group bookings

Oyster was invited to pitch for the digital marketing account of the UK’s number one outdoor activity provider, Go Ape. Go Ape is a well-known brand in the leisure sector with 35 sites in the UK, offering high ropes challenges, treetop adventures, zip wires, Segway tours and axe throwing in stunning forest locations. Despite the company’s high profile and strong brand image, its Facebook and Instagram advertising activities were underperforming, and there was also room for improvement with Google search advertising. 

After a three-way pitch, Oyster won the business and took over the account from the incumbent agency in late November 2020, just as the UK was on the brink of another Covid-19 lockdown which meant that all Go Ape’s sites were soon to close.

Oyster’s immediate challenge was to find a way for Go Ape to generate income during this difficult period and to then devise a strategy to maximise sales when Go Ape sites reopened after lockdown.

Post-Covid, Go Ape faced two further challenges: increased competition with the reopening of indoor leisure operators; and problems with recruiting staff, aggravated by Brexit and the remote locations of certain sites.

Solution

Enhanced targeting led to improved results

In November 2020, with only a week to spare we devised a Black Friday/Cyber Monday weekend promotion in conjunction with Go Ape, offering a 25% discount on any gift cards purchased during the 4-day period. Go Ape had run a similar offer on Facebook and Instagram the previous year which had generated £27,725 in sales, however we recommended they invest more in the campaign and we also adjusted the targeting so the ad spend was focused in areas around Go Ape sites using their customer heat maps for guidance (previously a nationwide approach has been adopted). This strategy led to our campaign generating £74,531 in sales over the 4-day period which was a very encouraging start.

Sadly, the country went into full lockdown shortly afterwards and while further campaigns to sell gift vouchers in the run-up to Christmas achieved a better return on ad spend than the previous year, we knew there was untapped potential and we could achieve a lot more. 

Our findings from our initial Go Ape campaigns showed that it was taking too long for our 35 local campaigns to exit the learning phase in Facebook, which meant that the algorithm was not able to perform to its full potential. While our localised targeting was a vast improvement to the national approach, we needed to further adjust our strategy ready for Go Ape’s reopening in the spring.

Instead of grouping the sites by location, we created regional campaign groupings and also experimented with targeting and testing different lookalike audience percentages. This strategy paid off and we saw a strong improvement in the return on investment. 

In terms of Google PPC advertising, we began by reviewing the campaign structure. The majority of Go Ape’s campaigns were national or regional and we decided to restructure their campaigns so that they were predominantly site-based. By doing this, we could achieve higher ad quality scores and take customers to relevant landing pages. In turn, a higher quality score would result in a lower cost per click and cost per conversion for the client. 

Like we did for Facebook, we looked at Go Ape’s Power BI to analyse their purchasing heat map. This contained information on where customers lived, visually enabling us to recreate the map in Google Ads around each Go Ape location to better target customers. This reduced wasted spend in areas that were not converting.

We also reviewed past search terms to start creating detailed negative keyword lists. By doing this, we were able to start filtering out specific terms and words that were not relevant and were wasting money.

Finally, we stopped advertising on Go Ape brand terms. Since their website was well-optimised and generally came up first in organic search results, we figured that if people were searching for Go Ape it was a waste of precious budget to pay for them to click on our ad rather than a free search result.