Drive traffic to the website and increase admission for National Geographic Encounter – an immersive attraction in the middle of Times Square that simulates an underwater experience.

Website traffic was declining because of the time of the year (after school spring breaks but before summer planning) which affected one of our primary targets – local parents. We wanted to get this great family experience on local parents’ radars when searching for potential activities.

We also knew National Geographic Encounter was a relatively new experience in the area. We needed to get more users to the website to learn more about the experience in order to move them further down the purchase funnel (and ultimately buy tickets).

To drive more site traffic, we decided to experiment with Google’s automated bid strategy for these Google Display Network campaigns, specifically to optimize toward clicks. We set a max CPC of $2 for each campaign as the CPCs to date hovered around that cost.

This bid strategy went into effect on May 18, 2018, so we decided to compare the first two weeks of the campaign running with the automated bid strategy to the prior two weeks when we were bidding on viewable CPM.

After placing the bid strategy, we saw it efficiently driving traffic to the website. On top of that, we also saw an improvement in the quality of site visitors directly driven by these campaigns. Users were now spending 30 seconds on average on our website as opposed to 14 seconds before we implemented the automated bid strategy. It’s worth noting that none of this affected bounce rate.

Overall, we were excited about the results and extended this automated bid strategy to other campaigns.