Google ROAS
12x+
Across our travel accounts, on search and PMax where visitor intent is already warm.
Prepared for Port Arthur Historic Site Management Authority (PAHSMA)
Prepared for PAHSMA
What we found inside Port Arthur's acquisition engine.
You don't have a demand problem. People already want to see a UNESCO convict site 90 minutes from Hobart. You have a value-per-visitor problem, and it's sitting in plain sight on your own booking page.
We spent an afternoon inside your tour menu and the Tasmanian travel category, and one structural pattern jumped out immediately.
$183Mthe category's single biggest ad line: Tour Operators & Agencies
(Nielsen Ad Intel, as at Dec 2025)
(Nielsen Ad Intel, as at Dec 2025)
The thing that caught our eye
Everyone else is paying to sell the trip. You already own the reason people take it.
Tour operators and agencies poured $183M into advertising last year, and OTAs another $126M. They are spending to manufacture intent for a destination. You are the destination. That makes your paid media a fundamentally cheaper game: you are capturing demand that already exists, not creating it from cold.
So the win isn't "more awareness". It's what happens after someone decides to visit. On your own site, every experience beyond the $55 site entry, the Premium Tour, Escape, Isle of the Dead, Ghost Tour, is framed as an add-on "in addition to site entry". That's a margin engine sitting behind a pricing wall.
We've solved thisAcross our travel accounts we've driven ROAS north of 12x by lifting order value, not just traffic.
Where the category money actually goes
The $677M is not being spent where you'd guess.
Two thirds of the category's spend is still parked in Newspapers and Television. Digital & Social sits second overall. Our read: the trade is over-indexed on broad reach and under-indexed on capturing the person who has already searched "things to do in Tasmania". That's a soft market to compete in for a destination with your intent advantage.
Newspapers and TV still dominate; the intent layer is comparatively uncontested · Source: Nielsen Ad Intel, as at Dec 2025
If your add-on attach rate is under 40%, there's a number here worth thirty minutes of your time. We'll show you the working.
Just hit replyThe timing quirk nobody games
The category peaks in January and collapses in December.
The whole category buys hardest for the January summer rush and goes quiet in December. That herd behaviour makes summer auctions expensive and the shoulders cheap. Your Ghost Tour is the lever most operators wish they had: an evening product, Wednesday to Sunday, that needs no daytime site entry. That's a standalone acquisition line you can run into the dark, wet, off-peak months when everyone else has stopped bidding.
Peak January, trough December: the shoulder months are where efficient spend lives · Source: Nielsen Ad Intel, as at Dec 2025
What you only learn from the inside
Things we know about selling destinations that aren't on any dashboard.
Ghost tours sell on rain
Evening product demand spikes intraday when the weather kills people's outdoor plans. You can lift bids in the morning off the forecast and convert a wet afternoon into a sold-out 8pm lantern tour.
Sell entry via trade, add-ons direct
OTAs and agents earn their cut on the low-margin site entry. The Premium, Escape and Isle of the Dead tours are where your margin lives, so those should be pushed hardest through channels you own, not commission-bearing ones.
The ferry is the real ceiling
Isle of the Dead capacity is capped by MV Marana sailings. Marketing a fixed-capacity product without yield rules just manufactures sold-out frustration. The play is dynamic pricing on the scarce sailings, not more traffic to them.
Cruise days aren't the prize
Ship arrivals swamp the site with walk-up volume you can't sell more to. The value is using those days to capture email and remarket the future independent traveller who plans a two-night Peninsula trip.
Target the bed, not the flight
You're a 90-minute Hobart daytrip. The highest-converting audience isn't people booking flights to Tasmania, it's people who have already booked Hobart accommodation. That intent signal is where remarketing should sit.
Three sites, one funnel
Port Arthur, the Coal Mines and Cascades Female Factory should be sold as a convict-trail pass. Cross-selling a $27 second site to someone already converting is cheaper than acquiring a fresh visitor for either.
One honest comparison
What efficient looks like in your category.
These are our own delivered numbers across Australian and New Zealand travel & tourism accounts, trailing twelve months. Deliberately rounded, real, and not something a competitor can find on Google. This is the bar we'd hold your account to.
Cost per purchase
Under $20
On booking-intent campaigns; the best accounts run well below this.
Meta CPM
Single digits
For evening and shoulder-season products where the auction is uncontested.
Sunny first-party benchmark, as at Jun 2026. Directional, not spend-weighted.
Three things we'd look at first
Where we'd start, specifically.
01
Turn the surcharge menu into a stack
Bundle Site Entry with the Premium Tour and Isle of the Dead as one "full experience" ticket at a headline price. Same experiences, reframed so the visitor buys up instead of buying out. This is an order-value lift with zero extra acquisition cost.
Track recordWe've driven cost per purchase under $20 by fixing the offer before touching the media.
02
Run the Ghost Tour as its own business
It needs no daytime entry and runs into the evening. That makes it a standalone funnel for Hobart locals and daytrippers, targetable on cheap shoulder-season auctions when the rest of the category has gone dark for December.
Track recordSingle-digit CPMs on evening product where nobody else is bidding.
03
Remarket the accommodation signal
Build audiences off people already researching a Tasman Peninsula or Hobart stay, then cross-sell the Coal Mines and Cascades sites to anyone who converts. Warm intent, owned channels, no commission leak.
Track recordROAS north of 12x when spend follows intent instead of reach.
This is a snapshot, not the plan
A real plan is built on better data than a quick scan.
We can see your menu and the category from the outside. With your booking data, attach rates and seasonality, this gets sharp fast.
Nielsen Ad IntelCategory & competitor ad-spend tracking
Roy MorganAudience & consumer profiling
Google Premier PartnerTop tier of Google agencies
Meta Business PartnerVerified platform access
This briefing is what we can see from the outside. Imagine what we'd build with the data on the inside.
Proof, not promises
Check out our success stories.
We've done this for travel & tourism brands right across Australia. See the campaigns, and the results, for yourself.
Check out our success storiesWhat this is actually worth
Here's the size of the prize.
$1M+
Annual revenue upside from add-on attach, directional
Here is the working. Lift the attach rate of a single $30 add-on tour by 10 points across your annual visitor base, and that is over a million dollars a year in high-margin revenue, before you touch pricing on the Ghost Tour, Isle of the Dead or a bundled convict-trail pass.
The Sunny team · Sunny Advertising