The strongest month of the year — on less spend, with the tracking finally telling the truth.
A boutique hotel in Coronado was already running Google Ads, and it was already working. But in hospitality paid media, “working” and “dialed in” are different things — and the gap between them is usually where the wasted budget and the missed bookings live.
The diagnosis
I went into the account looking for efficiency and waste, not just more volume. The campaigns needed restructuring, the targeting needed tightening to the highest-intent hotel searches, and the conversion tracking needed cleaning up before any number coming out of it could be trusted.
What we did
We rebuilt the campaign structure, focused targeting on the searches most likely to end in a booking, and repaired the conversion tracking end to end. On the paid-social side, we found a lead campaign that had quietly burned through budget and recorded zero leads — tracking that wasn’t firing at all — and flagged it for a rebuild instead of letting it keep spending invisibly.
The results
On Google Ads, one recent month returned a 14.6x tracked return on ad spend — up from 11.2x the month before — while cost per conversion dropped 14% and the conversion rate climbed to 21.1%. The hotel’s strongest month of the year, on less media budget than the month before it.
One honest note we put in every report: tracked return reflects platform-attributed conversion value, not confirmed booking revenue. We always say which is which — because the fastest way to lose a client’s trust is a number they later can’t reconcile.