Mohammad Bin Jamil looks after digital and content marketing as well as reputation management for Address Jabal Omar Makkah hotel in Saudi Arabia. He has over a decade’s experience working with hotel brands around the globe.
Saudi Arabia's hospitality sector is booming. We’re talking a 107% year-on-year increase in hotel rooms in the third quarter of last year alone. And with the overall market projected to grow from $15.4 billion in 2024 to $27.26 billion by 2033, things are just heating up.
While this rapid expansion can be great for business, it also means fierce competition in hotspots like Makkah. With over 800 hotels vying for the attention of millions of Muslim pilgrims who visit the kingdom annually for Umrah, Hajj, and Ramadan, standing out can be a real challenge — especially for newcomers.
At Address Jabal Omar Makkah we experienced this first-hand when we opened in late 2023. Despite being in a prime location, our initial occupancy rate was just above 10%, with most of our bookings coming through online travel agents (OTAs).
Knowing that Makkah's average hotel occupancy was around 63% last year, we saw a window of opportunity for one of our very first campaigns. Ramadan, with its influx of pilgrims, presented a golden moment to showcase our unique offerings, drive direct bookings, and reconnect with people who had shown an interest in our hotel but hadn’t booked.
Leaning in to our unique selling point to help us stand out
Umrah bookings from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) alone significantly increased last Ramadan due to eased Saudi visa processes and improved infrastructure. Seeing that surge and anticipating an increase from other countries too, we set our sights high: boost our occupancy from 10% to 60% during the holy month, focusing on driving direct bookings through our website. But with so many hotels competing for guests, we knew we had to stand out.
Our secret sauce? Sky Mussallah, the world's highest prayer room. Nestled in the skybridge connecting our two towers, this Guinness World Record holder offers unparalleled views of the Masjid Al-Haram and the Holy Kaaba, the sites that most religious tourists plan to visit.
With our hotel opening just three months before Ramadan, we knew we had to start marketing our central location and breathtaking vistas immediately, as these would be a major draw for pilgrims. So we used them as the hook in our video ad campaign:
Elevating guest relationships by encouraging direct bookings
Google Search insights revealed that it was mostly travellers from the Middle East as well as the U.K., U.S., and Indonesia that searched for accommodation in Makkah.1 That made sense to us, given those countries have large Muslim populations.
We wanted video ads in those markets to help us achieve two main goals:
- Drive traffic to our website to generate direct bookings
- Re-engage people who had shown an interest in our hotel but hadn’t booked
We knew that driving direct bookings would be a game-changer. Not only would it give us a clearer picture of our return on ad spend (ROAS), but it would also allow us to gather valuable first-party data to build stronger relationships with our guests.
But there was a hurdle even once we started gathering this information. Being so heavily reliant on third-party travel sites in the past meant that we needed to step up our measurement game to really understand our ROAS and make the most of direct bookings.
Building a strong measurement foundation from the ground up
We began by working with global omnichannel media agency, Assembly MENA, to implement enhanced conversions for web, a feature that improves the accuracy of conversion measurement and unlocks more powerful bidding.
Here’s how it works: When someone engages on our website — for example by making a booking — they share some basic information, like their email address. This first-party data is hashed — or scrambled to ensure privacy — and paired with Google data to help show our ads to the right people at the right time. This ensures we are complying with privacy regulations while still being able to see how our ads are performing, with optimised data helping us make better bidding decisions.
Enhanced conversions can also track conversions across different devices — even if someone isn’t signed in. This gives us a holistic view of our advertising impact while allowing for better cross-device campaign optimisation.
Lifting reach across formats with AI-powered Performance Max
With our measurement foundation solid, we were ready to dive into the world of direct bookings. We decided to experiment with Performance Max for the first time. This campaign type uses AI to boost conversions across all of Google's channels, helping us expand our reach and presence across different ad formats, and driving more potential guests — and therefore bookings — to our website.
"Performance Max's AI learns from first-party data," explains Omar Moursi, Account Strategist at Google. "By adding their own audience data as audience signals — suggestions that guide Google AI's optimisation for selected goals — to their campaigns, Address Jabal Omar Makkah provided Google Ads with a deeper understanding of their existing customers and website visitors. This helped to further enhance their ads’ reach, as they were more likely to be seen and engaged with by the right people."
To ensure we were making the most of our budget, we also used Customer Match. This helped us re-engage past visitors and reach similar audiences, lowering our cost-per-acquisition (CPA) and optimising for conversions more effectively.
Channelling keywords to help people find us
Being a new hotel, we understood that keyword strategy was key to getting us — and our USP — noticed. We needed to find the right balance between generic terms, like "hotel in mecca", and branded keywords — those featuring our hotel name.
Honestly, we were a bit unsure of this overall strategy at first. Would people even search for us by name if they didn't know who we were yet? But with 36% of travellers starting their hotel search online, we wanted to give it a shot.
We started with generic keywords, aiming to catch people early in their planning process. Since our location is just steps away from Masjid Al-Haram, we used terms like "hotel in mecca near haram" to attract those looking for inspiration and convenience. We chose this broader term instead of the exact mosque name to reach a wider audience, as not everyone uses an exact phrase when they search.
Knowing the audience we wanted to reach and recognising the seasonal focus, we also added Ramadan-specific keywords like "Ramadan Makkah" or "مكه في رمضان" to boost visibility during the holy month.
And, to cast an even wider net, we used broad match keywords, so our ads showed up on searches related to our keywords, even if they didn't exactly match our terms.
As our campaigns gained traction and people became more familiar with their hotel options, we saw an increase in searches for branded keywords like “the address makkah” and “address jabal omar makkah”. We added them into the mix, with those terms ultimately driving most of our bookings. That’s likely because people who specifically searched for our brand were already familiar with us, and closer to making a final decision on which hotel to book with.
By using this multi-pronged approach, we managed to reach potential guests at every stage of their journey, from initial research to final booking.
Creativity and smart strategy take business to new heights
Pairing our unique selling points — in our case our views and great location — with a solid measurement foundation and a balanced keyword strategy was a home run.
We boosted our occupancy rate to 57%, saw a 2.5X jump in our ROAS, and drove a 4X increase in revenue.
But we're not resting on our laurels. We're already exploring new markets with significant Muslim populations to expand our reach even further. Plus, we're excited to up our ad game and leverage the latest AI tools to personalise our ads and make them even more relevant to potential guests. And while Ramadan was a major focus, we'll be applying our learnings to all other seasonal campaigns too.
Explore our Ramadan collection for more campaign inspiration.
