Background

nxtConcepts is a full-service interactive marketing and media agency with offices in Vermont and Ohio. They specialize in providing marketing and media buying services with a focus on the travel and tourism industry.

One of nxtConcepts’ clients is TreEscape, an outdoor aerial adventure park based in New Jersey. TreEscape offers a variety of outdoor adventure activities consisting of rope walks, obstacles, climbing elements and zip lines, all located in the beautiful, forested setting of The Great Gorge.

Insight

As an outdoor facility, TreEscape is heavily reliant on clement weather, when people are more motivated to go outside into nature. A combination of sunshine and warm temperatures often generates peak attendances for the adventure park. Because TreEscape is usually a pre-planned event rather than a spur of the moment activity, their bookings are not precipitated by in-the-moment conditions so much as by a positive outlook for the week ahead, with a weighting towards the latter half of the week in anticipation of the weekend.

Challenge

nxtConcepts  were searching for a method to target audiences in the feeder markets of New York and New Jersey based on weather predictions for the adventure park. The concept was to utilize weather updates to maximize awareness and drive bookings around those times when the forecast was predicted to be warm and sunny for the upcoming weekend.
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Objective

The objective of the campaign was to Increase sales conversions on Google Display Network and Facebook.
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Implementation

nxtConcepts connected their Facebook and Google Display campaigns with WeatherAds and built powerful, automated weather-based rules to activate their ‘sunny’ ad set (on Meta) and ad group (on Display) when the forecast was sunny over a 3-day window. The rolling 3-day forecast was updated several times per day based on latest weather data.

When the forecast looked positive, WeatherAds would turn on the associated ads in Google and Meta. The ad copy also used the forecast as a hook to drive bookings for TreEscape. The tagline read “looks like sun, looks like fun!”

In addition, nxtConcepts ran parallel non weather-targeted ad sets and ad groups as controls to test the impact of the weather targeting on key metrics like click-through rate and cost per click.
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Result

nxtConcepts saw a higher CTR than the other display campaigns. They also achieved a 50% lower cost per click on Social.

• 50% Lower CPC on Social vs parallel campaign
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• Higher CTR on Display
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• Improved ROAS through weather relevancy

“The client loved how targeted the campaign was. They were happy, that's the number one result.”

- Sam Rufo, President, nxtConcepts