Digital Advertising: What was hot this summer.

Summer Rabbit For Blog Scaled

This Summer, we’ve driven 100,000 visits to websites and influenced over £3 million worth of online tickets. This is our round up of what is hot and what is not across Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Google, as well as our thoughts on Tik Tok advertising.

We work with clients all across the UK; from coastal theme parks, zoos and farm parks to scream parks and escape rooms. We hope you find this insight useful.

Facebook

Compared to last year, Facebook ad clicks have gone up slightly due to the increased competition using online advertising. This isn’t surprising when you consider there are now 10 million active advertisers in the UK.

On Facebook, our visitor attraction clients obtained an average cost per click of 30p, which is slightly higher than last year’s 29p.

The boosted event style ad post is still really effective at driving quality traffic that converts into ticket sales, whereas video and single image ads are both our top performing ad types for driving low cost per clicks. We saw a click to trackable conversion rate of 15% this summer.

Interestingly, we have seen some carousel ads being used on Facebook across our sector, however, through testing know other ad formats tend to work a lot harder in this platform.

Instagram

With a young, savvier audience than Facebook we’ve found the iOS update* has really impacted on measuring the number of sales, however ‘cost per clicks’ are remaining the same as last year, as are our ‘click through rates’.

The best performing post style for driving website traffic is video, closely followed by story carousel.

Instagram stories are a more expensive placement but we always feel you need both for a strong Instagram campaign.

*Not sure what the iOS update is? Apple have given everyone the opportunity to opt out of tracking. We can still measure click through rates but actual sales is currently tricky.  Facebook and Instagram are bringing out a new attribution (measurement model).

Google Search

Google Search has driven the best ROI this Summer across all campaigns.    

Cost per clicks have been around 16p, with a 4% conversion rate into an online purchase.

A top tip for Google Search though is to ensure you add your brand name as a negative keyword so you do not pay for people searching for you own brand name (where you appear top of Google anyway hopefully). You can easily burn money on Google Search if you don’t implement this.

Google Display

Google Display are image/text ads across the Google Display network. They are extremely good at driving mass awareness and this Summer our average cost per click were 7p.

To ensure your ads can run on all placements available for your target audience it is important to include a range of images, headline and descriptions. You can also include videos in your display ads by including links to your relevant YouTube videos.

YouTube

YouTube pre-roll ads continued to be highly effective this Summer for visitor attractions, with an average of 25% viewing the full or 30 seconds of the advert. A great awareness boost.

A few years ago YouTube changed its ads to attempt more click throughs. The click through rate has improved but nowhere near Facebook or Instagram; YouTube is still an awareness medium.

To make YouTube work at its optimum, however, your video needs to really grab their attention within the first 5 seconds before they can ‘skip’.

Tik Tok

We manage the online advertising for a number of scream parks and escape rooms which TikTok ads are perfect for. What is not perfect however are the geo targeting capabilities on TikTok. At the moment we’d have too much wastage to make TikTok advertising a contender. We know they are working on the geo targeting but alas won’t be in time for this Halloween season.

This article was written by Liz Dimes, Online Advertising Manager for Agility.

For more help and advice contact our team hello@agility-marketing.co.uk.

If you enjoyed this blog make sure you read: ‘How to Create Organic Instagram Videos that Drive Results‘.

Agility Marketing are a boutique marketing agency specialising in Digital Marketing for Visitor Attractions.