How We Delivered a 10.43x Google Ads Purchase Return on Ad Spend

A seasonally-paced Google Ads and Meta strategy helped Snowy Mountains Accommodation capture Winter 2026 search demand, defend direct bookings against OTA competition, and generate measurable site revenue across the campaign period.

The result at a glance

About the client

Snowy Mountains Accommodation by HolidayCo. manages a portfolio of holiday homes, units, and eco-chalets across Jindabyne, Crackenback, and the wider Snowy Mountains region. Ahead of Winter 2026, the business’s most important booking season, Method Marketing was engaged to build and execute a structured paid media strategy behind direct accommodation bookings.

The challenge

Accommodation demand in the Snowy Mountains is highly seasonal. The campaign faced three specific challenges:

• Timing the spend correctly — burning budget during low-intent periods before Winter searches intensified would have damaged the overall return
• Defending direct bookings — online travel agencies and competitor listings were competing aggressively for branded search traffic that should have been converting on the official site
• Managing a dynamic inventory — with a constantly changing property portfolio across multiple locations, static ad creative would have quickly become inaccurate and ineffective

Our approach

Seasonally-paced budgets

Rather than spending evenly across the campaign period, budgets were deliberately conservative during the March–April low season. We scaled up through the shoulder and peak months as genuine Winter intent built. This kept the campaign cost-efficient while demand was soft and allowed us to lean in aggressively once search volume intensified — maximising ROAS across the period rather than averaging it down with early low-conversion spend.

Google Ads: three campaigns built for intent

Rather than running a single broad Google Ads account, we split into three distinct campaigns:

• Search – Jindabyne & Snowy Mountains – Winter 2026 — the core acquisition engine, targeting people actively searching for Winter accommodation in the region
• Search – Crackenback & Perisher — capturing ski-access-specific search demand from a distinct audience segment
• Search – Brand & Competitors — a defensive layer to keep branded and competitor-adjacent searches converting on the official site, directly addressing the direct booking leakage identified in our earlier audit

The results by campaign show why the split mattered:

The Brand & Competitors campaign delivered the highest ROAS at 12.15x — confirming that defending branded search against OTA competition was one of the highest-value moves in the account. The Crackenback & Perisher campaign, targeting a more specific ski-access audience, delivered a strong 10.25x despite its smaller budget, and the highest click-through rate of the three campaigns at 8.57%.

Meta: reach the undecided, retarget the warm

Meta ran two audience layers simultaneously:

• Cold reach — building awareness among people not yet actively in-market for Snowy Mountains accommodation
• Retargeting — re-engaging website visitors who had shown intent but hadn’t completed a booking

We synced a Meta commerce catalogue directly to the site’s live HomHero property listings, powering dynamic catalogue ads that always reflected current availability and pricing across the full portfolio. This removed the need for manual creative updates as inventory shifted — a critical operational advantage for a business managing a constantly changing property mix.

Creative built to avoid fatigue

To keep the campaign feeling fresh across a long run, we produced bespoke video creative — including a dedicated “Winter 2026 is filling up fast” video — alongside carousel and static variations. These were deployed across Facebook Feed, Instagram Feed, Stories, and Reels to maintain momentum and reach across different content contexts.

What the results tell us

A 10.43x Google Ads purchase ROAS is a strong result in any category. In accommodation — where OTAs have enormous retargeting budgets and direct-booking campaigns are fighting against deeply entrenched consumer habits — it reflects the value of three specific decisions: splitting campaigns by intent rather than running one broad account, defending branded search aggressively, and timing budget deployment to match real seasonal demand rather than spreading it evenly across the year.

The 265 Meta checkouts initiated versus 13 purchases also points to a conversion gap worth addressing in the next campaign phase — either through checkout flow optimisation on the booking site or more aggressive retargeting of abandoned checkouts.

“Method understands our business and our season. We don’t have to think about the marketing — we just see the bookings come in.” – Andrew Tregent – Director, HolidayCo.

Key takeaways for seasonal businesses

• Seasonal budget pacing outperforms even spending. Matching budget deployment to actual demand curves — conservative in low season, aggressive in peak — consistently improves overall ROAS compared to spreading spend evenly across a campaign period.
• Branded and competitor campaigns are not optional for direct-booking businesses. If you’re not defending your own branded search, OTAs and competitors are taking those clicks — and the commission cost of OTA bookings far exceeds the cost of a well-managed brand campaign.
• Dynamic catalogue ads solve the inventory problem. For businesses with changing product or property inventory, syncing ads directly to a live catalogue removes a significant operational burden and keeps creative accurate without manual updates.
• Segmenting campaigns by audience intent reveals where your budget works hardest. A single broad campaign would have blended the 12.15x Brand ROAS with lower-performing cold traffic, obscuring where the real returns were coming from and making it harder to optimise.

Does your business have a peak season?

Most businesses do — and most aren’t extracting the full value from it. A well-structured Google Ads strategy timed around real demand can dramatically improve what your peak season actually delivers. If you want to talk through what a seasonally-paced paid media approach could look like for your business, book a free strategy session.