Work Paid media · Measurement
A $2K brand-defense campaign that returned 54X
For a Gulf Coast resort reopening after a hurricane, and the tracking rebuild that tied $15M in portfolio revenue back to its source.
Digital Marketing Manager · Hospitality agency · 2024–2026
Return on ad spend
54X
Every dollar spent defending the brand name brought back about fifty-four in bookings.
- Role
- Strategy, build, and reporting
- Client
- Resort reopening after a hurricane
- Channels
- Google Ads, GTM, GA4, Looker
- Budget
- $2K brand defense
- Result
- $250K in one year
The short version
When a hurricane-damaged resort reopened, third-party booking sites were capturing the guests already searching for it by name. I launched a $2K brand-defense search campaign that returned 54X, brought in $250K in its first full year, and rebuilt the tracking so every booking could be traced back to the click that earned it.
Margin noteBrand defense means bidding on your own name, so the people already looking for you land on your site instead of an intermediary's.
01
The situation
The resort had been closed for repairs after a hurricane. By the time it reopened, the people most likely to book were already searching for it by name, and online travel agencies were bidding on that name too. Every guest who clicked their ad instead of the resort's own site cost the property a commission.
The measurement wasn't much better. Bookings ran through a separate booking engine, and the tracking broke at checkout, so nobody could say which channel had actually produced a reservation.
The cheapest guest to win is the one already typing your name.
Margin noteBooking engines usually live on a different domain. Without cross-domain tracking, the session breaks at checkout and the sale gets credited to “direct.”
02
What I did
I set up a tightly scoped brand-defense search campaign on the resort's brand terms, with ad copy built around the reopening, and kept the budget small on purpose. The goal wasn't reach. It was to make sure the people already looking found the resort first.
Then I fixed the plumbing. I rebuilt Google Tag Manager and GA4 tracking across the booking engines, with cross-domain tracking, so a reservation could be followed back to the ad, search, or email that started it. Then I built Looker dashboards that tied revenue to source across the agency's hospitality portfolio.
03
Results
$250K
revenue in its first full year
$75K
ten weeks into the next year
$15M
portfolio revenue tied back to source
Across the rest of the paid portfolio, five clients from Cabo to Abu Dhabi on a combined $15K monthly budget, return on ad spend ran between 6X and 22X.
Margin noteThe test I use for anything I build is whether it still works the month I’m on vacation.
04
How it runs without me
The campaign is small and stable by design, so it doesn’t need daily attention. The dashboards answer “is it working?” for the client every month without a meeting, and the agency owns the tracking setup, so it keeps working whoever is running the account.