Long-term Google Display Remarketing

Nestled in the southeastern hills of Wisconsin, the beautiful Camp Anokijig has been welcoming children and families since 1926. Today, the glacial-born lake and wooded shoreline that Native Americans once called home is one of the premier youth camps in the country. Among the family programs, teen leadership programs, and adventure trips, the camp offers youth summer camp to boys and girls ages 7 to 16. Our team of experts suggested advertising on the Google Display Network in addition to the Google Ad Grant, which was covering the Search Network.

Camp Anokijig started their Display remarketing campaign with Cause Inspired Media on January 12th, 2017 with minimal historical data on their Google Ads (then AdWords) Account for remarketing. During the first month, the camp’s grant management team focused on building a remarketing list while focusing our targeted audience. After about 3 months, we had enough historical data through Google Analytics and Google Ads Remarketing tags to track and target users who were not completing registration for the summer program or who were engaged on Camp Anokijig’s website but left before completing registration.

From that point, there was an increase in the Remarketing campaign traffic. In addition to our new remarketing audiences, the team also enabled some older lists pulled from the historical data on their Google Analytics account. Although they were a contribution to the new rise in traffic, these older lists were not the main source of traffic. Camp Anokijig paused their Google Ads Display account in May 2017 until it was time to start advertising for the next year.

The camp started their Display Network campaigns for the second time with us in January 2018 for summer camp registration season. With the combination of fresh, new ads and historical data in the account’s Remarketing lists, the camp reached their limit of camper registration for the Summer season by April. With a little help from the Google Ad Grant covering the Search network, Camp Anokijig filled up available spots about two and a half months faster than ever before.

“Most of the traffic for Camp Anokijig comes from their ‘Awareness’ campaign, which focuses on name recognition. The camp name is used within the Display Ads in order to create a multi-channel marketing campaign. My team uses advanced targeting to reach new people in the market for summer camps and expose them to Camp Anokijig and its programs. When users later search for ‘Camp Anokijig’ we land them on the registration page to help establish the call to action to register for camp.” – Senior Digital Strategist Sarah Symoens

Continuing to build upon historical data and registration success, Camp Anokijig restarted Display Ads for 2019 summer camp registration in December 2018. The combination of Google Display and Search Ads from the Google Ad Grant led to over 412 users to begin online registration by April of 2019.

For Display campaigns, we view a 0.5% CTR as an average standard of performance. The Remarketing campaign in May 2018 had a CTR of 1.35%. An important item to note is that not all remarketing audiences are the same. If there are historical audience lists in Google Analytics, building a successful Remarketing campaign can take as little as one month.