Five resort brands, zero Google presence, one season

Oceana Resorts’ five Myrtle Beach properties (Anderson Ocean Club, The Patricia Grand, Carolinian Beach Resort, Ocean Park and the Oceana brand itself) came to this program with no Google footprint at all. No Ads accounts, no Analytics, no Search Console, no Tag Manager. Every account that exists now, we created.

Setting up paid media for a hotel group is mostly plumbing, and plumbing is where programs fail. Over one spring we built the account structure, a manager account with five properties under it, and got it through Google’s verification process. We put GA4 and Tag Manager on five websites. And the hard part: we wired booking revenue from the group’s booking engine into Google Ads and GA4, so the campaigns bid on the value of each reservation instead of on clicks.

That took a server-side integration worked out three ways, between us, the booking-engine vendor and the properties’ developers. Campaigns went live mid-season anyway: hotel ads and Performance Max for each property, on a seasonal media plan weighted to the Grand Strand booking curve. Heavy through spring and summer, down to a token presence in the off-season.

Four months in, the plumbing is paying for itself. Every booking’s dollar value is visible to the bidding, and the properties are converting paid traffic at single-digit dollars per booking action.