Google ROAS
12x+
Return on ad spend on Search and PMax, and higher on the best accounts.
Prepared for Zoos South Australia
Prepared for Zoos South Australia
What we found inside Zoos SA's acquisition engine.
You are not selling a ticket. You are selling a year of unlimited visits, an adoption, a donor relationship and a corporate venue hire, all off the back of the same visit. Most zoos market like it is one product. It is five.
Two parks, more than 2,900 animals, and a membership model that quietly turns a $45 day out into a multi-year relationship. That is the engine worth building around.
$677Mspent in the travel & tourism category last year
(Nielsen Ad Intel, as at Dec 2025)
(Nielsen Ad Intel, as at Dec 2025)
The thing that caught our eye
You are fighting airlines and cruise lines for the same family dollar, on a rounding-error budget.
The category poured $677M into media last year. Tour operators, airlines and booking platforms took the lion's share. Zoos SA cannot outspend a QANTAS brand campaign, and does not need to. Your advantage is that a membership is not a one-off transaction, it is a recurring one. Every day-ticket family is a member you have not signed yet, and a member is worth many times a single visit.
We've solved thisAcross our travel & tourism accounts we have driven ROAS north of 12x by targeting the repeat relationship, not the single sale.
Timing
The category peaks in January. A zoo's best visit weather does not.
Travel & tourism spend peaks in January and bottoms out in December (Nielsen, as at Dec 2025), riding the summer holiday wave. Here is our read: a 38 degree Adelaide January is the worst day to visit a zoo. Animals hide, families melt, and the experience underdelivers. Your demand pulse should follow school holidays and mild-weather shoulders, not the category's summer default.
Counter-programming the category calendar is cheaper media and a better on-the-day experience · Source: Nielsen Ad Intel, as at Dec 2025
Where the money goes
The category still spends a fortune on newspapers. Your visitors are not there.
Newspapers were the single largest channel in the category last year at $208M, ahead of Digital & Social at $193M (Nielsen, as at Dec 2025). For a conservation charity that legacy print spend often maps to older donor comms, which is fine for bequests. But the family-visit and membership buyer books on a phone, days out, often on a weather whim. That is a digital and social game, and it is the half of the category budget most brands still under-index against.
Print is a donor channel. Visits and memberships live on digital · Source: Nielsen Ad Intel, as at Dec 2025
Want to see how your visit-to-membership path holds up against a January-heavy category calendar? We will pull it apart on a call.
Just hit replyThe company you keep
Share of attention, not share of wallet.
You compete for the same weekend decision as the biggest spenders in the country. This is the scale of the room you are standing in. The point is not to match them. It is to be undeniable in your own postcode when a Kaurna or Ngarrindjeri family is choosing what to do on Saturday.
You will not win on volume. You win on relevance and repeat · Source: Nielsen Ad Intel, as at Dec 2025
What you only learn from the inside
Things we know that aren't on any dashboard.
Families book five days out
Zoo and park visits are not planned months ahead like a flight. The booking window is short and weather-sensitive. Your media should be always-on and forecast-triggered, not a burst around holidays.
Baby animals are free reach
A new otter litter or a first flamingo chick is the cheapest CPM you will ever buy. The mistake is spending it all on PR and never wiring those moments to a membership or adoption call to action.
Members lapse from boredom
People do not cancel over price. They lapse when there is nothing new to come back for. Renewal comms timed to new exhibits and births beat any discount code.
Adoptions peak at Christmas
Animal adoptions sell as gifts, not as donations. The demand curve looks nothing like tickets. Late November to December is where that product earns its keep, and it needs its own creative, not a footer link.
Venue hire is the quiet money
Functions and corporate partnerships are high-margin B2B revenue most zoos market as an afterthought. A separate lead funnel here can subsidise a lot of conservation.
Monarto and Adelaide are two audiences
An open-range safari park 60km out and a heritage zoo in the CBD attract different intents and different drive times. Pooling them into one campaign wastes both. They deserve separate targeting and separate stories.
Three things we'd look at first
Where we'd start, specifically.
01
Make membership the default, not the upsell
A family buying two adult and two child day tickets is often one nudge away from a membership that pays for itself in two visits. Lead with that maths at the point of purchase, not after.
Track recordCost per purchase under $20 across our travel accounts on Google.
02
Buy media on the forecast
Push spend on mild-weather weekends and school holidays, pull it on extreme-heat days when the experience underdelivers. Weather-triggered budgets protect both your ROAS and your reviews.
Track recordSingle-digit CPMs on Meta when creative and timing line up.
03
Wire the baby-animal moments to a CTA
Every birth and arrival is organic reach you already earn. Attach a membership or adoption offer to each one so the attention converts, instead of just trending and fading.
Track recordROAS north of 12x when we retarget warm, high-intent audiences.
One honest comparison
What we've delivered for travel & tourism brands.
These are our own first-party numbers across Australian and New Zealand travel & tourism accounts, trailing twelve months. Deliberately rounded, real, and not something a competitor can find online (Sunny first-party benchmark, as at Jun 2026).
Cost per purchase
Under $20
On Google, for a completed booking or sign-up.
Meta CPM
Single digits
Cheap, high-frequency reach for warm family audiences.
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. With your membership, ticketing and donation data on the inside, the picture sharpens 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+
in recurring membership revenue, on one conversion assumption
Here is the working. Across both parks you sell a large base of single day-visit tickets each year. Convert even a low single-digit percentage of those families into annual members, and hold them beyond the first year, and it compounds quickly, because members visit repeatedly, and adopt and donate at higher rates than day visitors. That recurring membership base, not the one-off ticket, is where the real number sits, comfortably past seven figures.
Your Sunny lead · Strategy, Sunny Advertising