Apex Hotels manage and operate 7 modern contemporary (100+ rooms per property) hotels in Edinburgh, Dundee and London. The rapidly expanding hotel group is opening 2 new hotels in London over the coming years.
Occupancy Marketing has engaged with Apex Hotels on providing internet marketing services since 2006. The hotelier is widely regarded as being one of the most Internet savvy operators in the UK and in common with other clients, benefit from an internal Internet Marketing team with whom we work very closely.
Our Service
In 2009, one of our remits was to explore the opportunities to expand PPC in domestic and global markets. The company was keen to re-invest funds from traditional advertising into PPC, increasing our budget by 150% over previous years.
The following PPC services are offered to Apex Hotels:
- Keyword research UK & International
- Ad Copy testing (multiple languages)
- PPC landing pages (multilingual)
- A to B Testing
- Bid management
- Protecting the brand
- Conversion analysis and reporting
Due to our relationship with Google, Apex hotels became the 1st hotel in Europe to test Google Site Links feature, before it was rolled out to other Google AdWords customers.
With Edinburgh & London attracting customers from all over the globe, the PPC campaigns were set up and translated into multiple languages, focussing on niche searches which other advertisers had either ignored or didn't have the resources to tackle.
The offers and booking engine were also translated to encourage conversion from International markets.
Offline and online advertising was used simultaneously when TV ads for Apex Hotels were run during the commercial breaks of The X Factor in the UK. Paid search ads which were displayed during these times utilised the site-links feature by promoting the same special offers mentioned in the TV adverts.
Additionally, the paid search ads were geo-targeted to be displayed in only those regions where the TV ad had been broadcast.
Results
The Apex Hotels paid search campaigns have an average ROI of 17 times the cost, with the following increased in Online Bookings recorded for each country:
- 12% year on year increase in online revenue from Germany
- 18% year on year increase in online revenue from France
- 23% year on year increase in online revenue from Italy
- 35% year on year increase in online revenue from Portugal
- 68% year on year increase in online revenue from the Netherlands