Cost per purchase
Under $20
On Google, across our travel accounts. On a $52.50 ticket, that is healthy headroom.
Prepared for The Sovereign Hill Museums Association
Prepared for Sovereign Hill
What we found inside Sovereign Hill's acquisition engine.
You have quietly built one of the smartest pricing ladders in Australian tourism, from a $52.50 day ticket up to a $125 Annual Pass. The category's media spend is built to sell the opposite: a single trip, once.
A $677M category is pouring money into pushing Australians onto planes and cruises. You are selling a full day, forty minutes from Ballarat, that a family can repeat all year. That mismatch is the opportunity.
$677Mspent across the travel & tourism category
as at Dec 2025
as at Dec 2025
The thing that caught our eye
The category buys first trips. Your model is built on the second, third and fourth.
Airlines, cruise lines, OTAs and tour operators account for the vast majority of that $677M, and almost all of it optimises to one thing: a single booking. Your ticket page tells a different story. General Admission at $52.50, a Locals Pass at $77.50, an Annual Pass at $125 that pays for itself in three visits. That is a frequency business wearing an attraction's clothes.
Here is our read: most attraction media stops at the first ticket sold and never carries the visitor toward the pass. If your paid channels optimise to General Admission conversions only, you are buying your highest-value customers and handing them your lowest-value product.
We've solved thisAcross our travel & tourism accounts we have driven north of 12x ROAS by bidding to lifetime value, not the first ticket.
Seasonality, read against your calendar
The category shouts in January. You built a business for July.
Category ad spend peaks in January and bottoms out in December, chasing the summer holiday. Winter Wonderlights does the harder, cleverer thing: it manufactures demand in the off-season, when the biggest spenders in your category have gone quiet and regional media is at its cheapest.
Winter is when attention is cheapest to buy and you have the most to sell. Source: Nielsen Ad Intel, as at Dec 2025.
Let us show you what a winter media plan looks like when nobody else in the category is bidding.
Just hit replyWhere the category money actually goes
Everyone is selling a flight out. Almost nobody is selling a day in.
Tour operators, OTAs and airlines dominate spend. Hotels, resorts and destination experiences sit at the bottom. For a physical attraction with an on-site hotel, that is a thin, under-contested lane, especially against intent that could stay in regional Victoria rather than leave it.
The loudest categories sell people out of your market. That leaves domestic experience demand under-served. Source: Nielsen Ad Intel, as at Dec 2025.
What you only learn from the inside
Things we know about attraction media that aren't on any dashboard.
Families book late
School holiday attraction demand converts inside a two week window, not months out. The states stagger their holidays, so a single national flight ignores three separate spikes you could win one at a time.
Resellers eat the margin
Klook, Experience Oz and the like will happily sell your ticket and keep 20 to 25 percent. The cheapest customer you will ever own is the one who searches your name and buys direct, and that lane is defended with branded search, not left open.
Two audiences, opposite creative
A Melbourne tourist needs bucket-list framing: pan for real gold, go underground, once in a lifetime. A Ballarat local needs a reason to come back: what is new this season. Same map pin, opposite message, and running one for both wastes half the spend.
Weather moves the needle
Outdoor attraction bookings track the seven day forecast harder than any demographic. Pulsing budget up on a sunny long-weekend forecast and easing off a washout beats a flat daily spend every time.
The hotel changes the maths
A ticket buyer is worth $52.50. A ticket-plus-stay buyer is worth several multiples of that. Feeding the accommodation signal into your bidding lets you pay more to win the visitors who convert into an overnight, not just a day.
The pass is a retention product
Selling an Annual Pass to a first-time visitor at the point of exit, when the day is still fresh, converts far better than a cold campaign months later. Most attractions never build that hand-off into their media at all.
One honest comparison
What acquisition actually costs in this category.
These are our delivered numbers across Australian and New Zealand travel & tourism accounts, rounded and kept deliberately loose. They are the benchmark we would hold a Sovereign Hill plan against.
Blended ROAS
12x+
North of 12x on Google, similar on Meta, before you factor in pass renewals and stays.
Meta CPM
Single digits
We hold reach costs in single-digit CPMs, which is why off-peak winter buying goes so far.
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
Defend the direct booking
Audit how much of your ticket revenue flows through resellers taking a 20 to 25 percent cut, then lock down branded search so anyone typing "Sovereign Hill" lands on your $52.50 page, not a reseller's marked-up one.
Track recordSub-$20 cost per purchase on Google across our travel accounts.
02
Bid to the pass, not the ticket
Rebuild the conversion setup so campaigns optimise toward Annual and Locals Pass value, and add an exit-point offer that turns a first great day into a 12 month relationship while the memory is fresh.
Track record12x+ ROAS by bidding to lifetime value, not first purchase.
03
Own the winter nobody's buying
Concentrate reach on Winter Wonderlights when category CPMs are at their lowest and the airlines and OTAs have gone quiet, using weather and staggered school-holiday triggers rather than a flat always-on flight.
Track recordSingle-digit Meta CPMs, stretched further in off-peak windows.
This is a snapshot, not the plan
A real plan is built on better data than a quick scan.
Everything above we read from the outside, off your website and category data. With your ticketing, accommodation and pass-renewal numbers, the picture gets a great deal sharper.
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.
$72.5k
Per 1,000 first-visit buyers converted to an Annual Pass
The working is deliberately simple. Every first-time visitor you move from a $52.50 General Admission to a $125 Annual Pass is worth roughly $72.50 more in first-year revenue. Convert 1,000 of them and that is about $72,500, before a single repeat visit, retail spend or overnight stay is counted.
Directional only, built on one stated assumption (the GA-to-Annual price gap) and your actual first-visit volumes, which we would confirm together. Repeat visitation and hotel spend would push it higher.
One detailed teardown per category per month
The next 30 minutes
Let's pressure-test the pass economics together.
Bring your ticketing mix and we will show you where the frequency revenue is leaking and what a winter-weighted plan would look like.
Just hit replyNo deck required. We will come with the category numbers already loaded.
This isn't a sales call in disguise. If the honest answer is that your current approach is working, we will tell you and leave you with the analysis.
- ✓
The pass leak
Where first-visit media stops short of the Annual and Locals Pass, and what that costs you a year.
- ✓
The winter play
How to buy Winter Wonderlights reach while the category's biggest spenders are quiet.
- ✓
The reseller audit
How much margin is walking out the door through third-party ticket sellers, and how to win it back direct.