Case Study: How CausalFunnel Led To A 207% ROAS Improvement For American Ghost Walks
American Ghost Walks is a fast-growing tour company that is known for its haunted and historical walking experiences that take place across many major U.S. cities. Their marketing team had ambitious goals to scale paid search campaigns in order to reach new audiences. However, there was a major obstacle that stood in the way: they lacked accurate conversion tracking to see what ads were leading to bookings. This data blind spot was undermining the performance and growth of their tourism marketing efforts. In order to address this critical gap, American Ghost Walks came to us here at CausalFunnel to build a seamless, AI-driven attribution solution that could finally connect their travel ads to real bookings.
Background & Problem
Despite having run multiple high-intent travel agency ads across Google Ads, the American Ghost Walks team faced a frustrating dilemma as ads were driving clicks, but there was no reliable way to measure which campaigns converted into sales. Since their previous booking platform completed transactions on a separate domain, Google Ads couldn’t detect when a visitor who clicked on an ad actually made a booking. The result was a disconnect between ad spend and revenue, leaving the team with incomplete data and limited confidence in their campaign performance. This is essential, once you notice that something isn’t working it’s important to fix it before it gets worse. Without accurate attribution, or proper targeting, scaling effective tourism marketing campaigns felt like flying blind.
At the same time, the company’s growth strategy relied on localizing travel advertisements to promote ghost tours in multiple cities. But this diversification in messaging also made performance tracking more complex and difficult to target the appropriate surrounding areas. It was almost impossible to determine which cities were delivering the best return on ad spend? Which keywords were attracting buyers versus window shoppers? The lack of visibility made it difficult to double down on winning strategies or eliminate underperforming ones. What American Ghost Walks needed was not just a travel marketing agency, but a deeply technical tourism marketing agency that could engineer a full-funnel tracking solution across platforms and provide actionable insights on what was truly working.
Case Study
Here at CausalFunnel our team decided to approach this challenge with a clear understanding of the intricacies of third-party booking systems like FareHarbor, Peek, Tripworks, etc. We began by analyzing the journey of their typical customer who clicked on a travel ad, was then redirected to the American Ghost Walks site, and then was sent to Tripworks for booking and their payment. The main issue was that the unique click ID from Google Ads (GCLID) was somehow lost during this transition which effectively broke the link between ad click and sale. As a result, Google Ads had no way of knowing that a successful booking had occurred which made campaign reporting unreliable and undervaluing successful tourism marketing efforts as there was no way to know where the booking was coming from.
Then we built a mechanism that captured the GCLID the second that a user landed on the site and then ensured to maintain it when directed to the Tripworks booking URL. This small but crucial change allowed our systems here at CausalFunnel to track each booking’s origin, even if the final transaction happened off-site. The key in this process was ensuring that the GCLID traveled securely from click to confirmation. With this adjustment, we restored the ability to trace bookings back to their respective travel agency ads and ad groups. This was the first of many steps needed in order to create an airtight attribution model that could support confident ad optimization techniques in order to make budgeting decisions more efficient.
How CausalFunnel’s AI Fixed the Problem
Our team began by capturing the GCLID, but this was only part of the solution. Next, our team here at CausalFunnel developed a robust booking log infrastructure that synced with Tripworks webhook system. Every new booking triggered a webhook event, sending real-time data with everything from the booking ID, customer email, date, and GCLID to our secure database. These data points were then used by our team to build a complete attribution profile for each customer. When we found that a GCLID was present, our system can automatically mark that booking as a result of Google Ads click rather than another journey. This real-time processing allowed our team to create a dynamic feedback loop that allows for insight into the effectiveness of each tourism marketing campaign that we run.
The final and most critical layer that our team implemented involved pushing these verified conversions back into Google Ads via the Offline Conversion API. Our system was able to identify GCLID-tagged bookings and format them into a clean payload that included timestamp, conversion name, transaction value, and currency code. Google Ads then is able to use the GCLID to match each offline conversion with the original click in order to keep the data. This reconnected the dots between click and booking, giving American Ghost Walks the full picture of their travel marketing agency performance, something they had never had before.
But CausalFunnel’s solution did more than restore the location tracking; it powered growth. With full-funnel data feeding back into Google Ads, American Ghost Walks could now optimize campaigns based on real revenue, not just click data that doesn’t provide enough data. They were able to identify high-performing cities, fine-tune bids for peak hours, and allocate more budget to ads that were consistently converted into paying customers. Our AI system also helped suppress wasteful spending by detecting which keywords or demographics were least likely to lead to bookings. These optimizations drastically improved American Ghost Tour’s ROAS across their travel ads, giving the team the confidence to scale efforts more effectively.
Conclusion
The automation our team created ensured that this process was low-maintenance and sustainable for long term growth, not just quick cash grabs that don’t stick around. Once our system was implemented, it was able to run seamlessly in the background, requiring no daily input from the internal team. Optimizing your efforts is essential to keep this growth around long term. This freed up the marketing departments time so that they could focus on creative strategy, content, and expansion planning. It also meant that data was always up-to-date, with each new travel advertisement click being evaluated based on actual downstream results not just guesses.
In conclusion, CausalFunnel’s AI-driven approach transformed American Ghost Walks’ tourism marketing strategy from reactive to data-informed optimizations. This is crucial to stay one step ahead of your customers. By solving the offline attribution problem and building a trustworthy, automated feedback loop into Google Ads, we set their team up to make smarter decisions and scale their marketing efforts with confidence. What started as a problem of missing conversions evolved into a growth engine that is fueled by complete visibility and real-time insights to inform their decisions. For any company struggling with third-party booking tools and opaque campaign reporting, us here at CausalFunnel have proven that we can support your business as you aim to scale long term.
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