Nomada case study
Replacing a black box with a transparent booking engine.
Two hotels paid a booking vendor a flat fee per property for ads with no reporting attached. Five more properties had no paid presence at all. Nobody could say what a booking cost or which nights the spend was filling.
The numbers at a glance
Proof box.
Published July 22, 2026. Updated July 22, 2026.
| Client type | Boutique hotel group, Paso Robles and the Central Coast: five hotels and three restaurants |
|---|---|
| Objective | Replace unmeasured vendor spend with owned campaigns tied to booking revenue |
| Channels | Google Search and Maps; brand and new-guest demand separated |
| Measurement period | 2026 year to date, with a recent-month detail |
| Primary outcome | 11.6x booking revenue against spend |
| Efficiency outcome | $39 average cost per direct booking at launch pace |
| Ramp | New-guest campaigns went from 0.4x to 4.5x return in about 90 days |
| Attribution status | Revenue read directly from the booking engine; phone and walk-in bookings not attributed, so reported value is a floor |
Starting condition
The prior arrangement was a flat monthly fee per property for advertising the group could not inspect: no search terms, no cost per booking, no way to tell brand demand from new demand. The remaining properties, together a multi-million dollar operation, had no paid presence at all.
The work
Rebuilt advertising in accounts the group owns. Brand demand separated from new-guest demand so the group pays attention to incremental revenue, not to guests who were coming anyway. Value reported straight from the booking engine so every dollar reads in room revenue.
Deliberately excluded: metasearch spend the group could not measure, and any reporting line that mixes brand capture with genuinely new demand.
Methodology and limits
Return multiples divide booking-engine revenue attributed to campaigns by total spend. Because phone bookings and repeat stays influenced by ads are not attributed, the true return is higher than reported; the number published is the floor we can prove. Seasonality on the Central Coast is real, and year-to-date figures smooth it but do not erase it.
Results