PORTFOLIO
SUMMARY
Guided volcano trekking tours to Mt Batur in Bali is a highly competitive market. Overcoming click fraud and web spam is a constant battle, but we were able to build a highly effective website and competitive Google Ads campaign, nonetheless.
SERVICE CATEGORIES
- Web Design
- Local Marketing
- Google Ads
- Google Analytics
Traffic More than Doubled
“We’ve used Dino, Ratri and the team at Cabaretti on a number of projects, from web design to our current Google Ads campaigns. They’ve come through for us each time, increasing both traffic and sales to our travel/tourism website. In fact, our guest reviews indicate that they often choose us because of how professional the site looks. In the year we’ve been using Cabaretti, our traffic has more than doubled, but more importantly, sales are up by over 65% and climbing.”
– Gede R, Bali Trekking Exploration
An Ethical & Respected Tour Guide
As one of the most popular tourist destinations in the world, there are a lot of businesses that promote to travelers on this small, but very busy, Indian Ocean island. Tour companies are very aggressive with their marketing and many start-ups fail to break through to a profitable status.
Bali Trekking Exploration was a good fit for Cabaretti, right from the start. With excellent customer reviews in both Google and Trip Advisor, it was clear to us that the small trekking and tour company was one of the best in the business, offering guided volcano treks, guided cultural tours and other adventures to travelers from around the world.
The owner, Gede Redika, is a smart Balinese business man with integrity and a dedication to high quality service. His guides provide guests with great care whether it be volcano trekking, river rafting, water sports or cultural tours.
Increase Sales
The objective was simple; since most visitors book online, we needed to create more online sales for the client with a more user-friendly and reliable experience and booking process. Once this was achieved, we needed to find a way to drive traffic to the client’s booking page that did not include SEO.
We approached these objectives with the two strongest Cabaretti services we have; web design and Google Ads.
Beating the Bad Players
Because many trekking companies in Bali ignore Google quality guidelines, manipulation of search engines for better visibility is prolific. Competing in this market to overcome the high ranking of these manipulators while trying to comply with Google terms of service is extremely difficult.
Most of the websites in the industry are outdated with very poor user experience. Therefore, we set out to create a website that visitors trust. Foreigners who travel to Bali are looking for unique things to do, but want a reputable guide, instructor and service to provide it. They also need to trust that their payment is protected as visitors are wary of providing payment details to companies in developing nations. We found that consumers are not necessarily looking for the best price, but an outfit they can rely on to give them a great experience with fair fees.
The client was receiving a lot of cancellations because he had no payment option on the websites. Guests just emailed him to book their adventure and payment wasn’t processed until the day of the trek. This led to a lot of cancellations, lost bookings and money.
The final challenge was overcoming the fraudulent clicks on ads that were prevalent within the industry.
An Easier Experience for the Visitor
We first set out to re-design a complete new website that is user-friendly, intuitive and trustworthy. We re-wrote the content to give the visitor everything they need to make a purchasing decision right then. We answered all their questions and objections and created areas for guest safety, payment protection and cancellation facilitation.
While on vacation, many guests are concerned that they cannot get their money back if an unavoidable cancellation of their booked trek occured. We addressed this concern and provided clear refund instructions were this to happen.
We couldn’t use most booking engines because of the restrictions banks and other financial institutions put on Indonesia so we installed a secure PayPal booking form to process payments. This way, payment could be made immediately and guests felt secure that their money was processed by a reliable source. This helped ease consumer security concerns and also solidified bookings for the client, making it less likely for guests to cancel since money had already exchanged hands.
65% + Increase in Sales
Once a solid new website was completed, we launched a Google Ads campaign that saw immediate success, but was promptly inundated with fraudulent clicks, apparently by a competitor. We immediately set up click fraud software and reported the activity to Google and were issued a refund for all non-consumer clicks.
As of now, the ads provide over 90% of client bookings. Conversion rates climbed by over 400% due to the intuitive user experience on the website and guest cancellations declined by 55%.
We continue to improve performance with A/B testing on ads and landing pages. We also analyze user recordings and search queries to determine a more accurate user intent.
Other than the dip we had in activity due to click fraud, the client has experienced a 13-17% growth rate in sales every month since inception of the ads campaign.
