Paid Media

ROOST Apartment Hotel: Increasing Revenue by 41% While Decreasing CPA by 74%

This work was delivered by From The Future, which is now Intrepid Digital.

FTF partnered with ROOST Apartment Hotel to increase their Return on Ad Spend to over 800% during Covid-19.

41%

Increase in monthly revenue

Increase in conversion rate

159%

Decrease in CPA

74.56%

Fun Fact

ROOST came to FTF after another prominent paid media (only) agency wasn’t able to find profitability from the channel.

The Client

Bright living room of a ROOST apartment with a gray sectional sofa, leather armchair, glass coffee table and tall windows.

ROOST Apartment Hotel provides furnished, fully equipped studio, one and two-bedroom apartments for temporary and extended stays in the heart of Philadelphia. Get all the services and amenities of a boutique hotel in the comfort of your own space.

As ROOST prepared for aggressive expansion along the East Coast, they engaged FTF to help them design and launch a paid media strategy to validate their market opportunities.

The Strategy

Spreadsheet of Philadelphia and general transactional keywords with columns for word count, intent, location, content hub, monthly search volume and cost per click. Keyword text is blurred.

Launch small and sprint toward profitability. Initial cost per conversions were projected to be near $500 based on market saturation and a few large, established competitors.

FTF’s paid media strategy was to be proactive in managing negative keywords, tightly manage exact match and phrase match tests for signs of wasted Ad spend, and kill campaigns as soon as they were deemed under-performers.

Google Ads list of negative keywords, each added to either the National or Local Philadelphia campaign. Keyword text is blurred.

All of this would be driven by analytics, starting with FTF validating all data was flowing accurately from ROOST’s booking portal (Windsurfer) and their Google Data Studio dashboards.

Google Ads chart titled What Happened, showing clicks and conversions from January 1 to July 17, 2019, with arrows marking early April, mid to late April, early May and late May. — Clicks and conversions from January to July 2019, before the campaign described here began in August 2019.

The Campaign

Things quickly progressed as FTF was able to considerably drive down the cost per conversion while driving up both the campaigns overall conversion rates and overall ROAS.

When we hit the slow season in Q1 of 2020 we expected things to level off, and were actually quite encouraged finishing March exceedingly strong in terms of ROAS.

Then Covid-19 took its toll, starting in April 2020. Return on Ad Spend plummeted as cost per acquisition shot up over 30%. May was a challenging month of analysis and creative strategy.

Ultimately, after a rocky May, FTF was able to get things back on the right track (and trajectory) starting in June, and have been able to soldier on up the hill of higher ROAS ever since.

The Results

Chart of monthly cost per conversion, conversion rate and return on ad spend from August 2019 to October 2020; cost per conversion falls from $269.81 to $68.65 and ROAS reaches 8.2 in October 2020.

After 14 rocky months navigating a new customer acquisition campaign for a long-term stay company, during one of the most devastating travel periods in modern history, ROOST is back on track for profitable growth.

Overall the campaign has led to success with ROOST planning to continue to open new locations across the Eastern Seaboard in 2021.

Overall online bookings are up over 41%, the conversion rate from paid is up 159% from the start of the campaign, and the ROAS for October 2020 hit 820%, the second highest ever.

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