Pay Per Click Advertising Case Studies

Chimu Adventures

Leading international tour operator, Chimu Adventures used Google AdWords as its main online advertising vehicle to create brand awareness and increase business by 90%.

 

The Evolution of Chimu

Greg Carter and Chad Carey met in 1998 while working at a ski resort in the US. Both were taking a break from studies at Australian universities at the time and became roommates for a few months while living in the States. Greg later moved to Peru with his wife and lived there for a year. Chad moved to England, where Greg would later reunite with him. Both men clearly had an interest in international travel: Greg worked briefly as a travel agent and Chad enjoyed researching travel tours, especially in South America. While attending the annual Oxford Cambridge boat race in England, the two men came up with a brilliant idea: starting a travel business together that would offer individuals and groups customisable and personalised service and options for travel tours at the best possible rates. After receiving initial funding from a few investors, Chimu Adventures, which gets its name from a culture in Northern Peru, was officially founded in 2004, six years after its founders met.

 

Where Do We Go From Here?

When Chimu first started, the two men asked Chad's brother, a web developer who was a student at the time, to create Chimu's website for them as a favour. The men knew that they had to drive people to their website. Once users got there, Chad and Greg knew that those users would be able to see the uniqueness and value of their services and tours. "We knew that there weren't many, if any, tour operators that offered the flexibility we did for travellers to customise their trips or tours and make it perfect. We also knew that our services were cheaper than everyone else's, since we constantly research on the internet to make sure of this. The question then became, ‘How do we get people to see what we have to offer them?'" Greg explains.

Chad and Greg initially tried advertising in newspapers, online directories and even through letter drops. "We tried everything you could possibly think of to advertise our site. We found that this strategy was hit or miss, and the risks for us and our fledgling business were tremendous," Chad explains. Chimu was soon in for some much-needed change.

 

One Way Ticket to Success

While researching online, Chad and Greg discovered Google AdWords. They quickly created their AdWords account with a budget of $20 a day. They started out with one simple advertising campaign and a few general keywords that would trigger their ads to be shown on Google and on other sites in Google's ad network.

After monitoring the performance of that campaign, Chad and Greg built more specific campaigns to reach online searchers and users in a more targeted way based on geographical locations. "Because AdWords provides real-time performance statistics for our ads and keywords, it quickly became clear to us how we wanted to structure our AdWords account in order to achieve maximum results," explains Greg. "That level of insight and targeted control is extremely important to our business and we've never been given that through our previous methods of advertising."

Chimu's founders also state that AdWords is responsible for 90 percent of Chimu's business, and they allot 90 percent of their overall marketing budget to it. "We thank Google AdWords for bringing in almost all of our business. It's the best way to advertise our business and website. It's as simple as that," says Chad.

"We have been able to grow an idea of ours into a burgeoning business thanks, in large part, to Google AdWords," says Chad. Chimu forecasts its annual revenue this year to be in excess of $1 million. Needless to say, Chad and Greg have increased their daily budget with Google AdWords quite significantly from what they had initially set it at, $20. "We love that we're able to spend what we're comfortable spending, and that AdWords will work with whatever budget we set in order to get us the most amount of online traffic out there," Greg explains.

 

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