Full-Funnel Tourism Advertising for the North Okanagan

The North Okanagan is one of those places that gets under your skin—emerald lakes, trail networks for days, farms and orchards, and a strong thread of local and Indigenous culture running through it all. The region invites people to “enjoy year-round activities at your own pace,” balancing adventure with cultural immersion. explorenorthokanagan.com

Explore North Okanagan is the destination marketing organisation (DMO) tasked with telling that story and driving visitation across the region’s communities. Our job at Binary & Co was to turn the messaging of the region into a scalable, measurable digital engine that gets people from dreaming about the North Okanagan to booking their trip.

Over our first year together, we built their Google and Meta Ads programs into a full-funnel system and saw some pretty dramatic performance.

Background: From great content to a predictable pipeline

Explore North Okanagan already had a strong foundation:
– A clear sense of place and identity
– Deep content around trails, local food, culture, and four-season experiences
– Active social channels sharing the region’s “trails, land, culture, and community” story

What they needed was a way to consistently:
– Put that content in front of the right travellers at the right time
– Turn all of that interest into tangible actions—clicks to partners, booking lookups, and serious trip-planning behaviour
– On top of that, tourism is inherently seasonal.

The brief wasn’t “run a summer campaign,” but build something that could flex across winter, summer, and the shoulder seasons while still giving partners clear, performance-driven reporting.

Our Approach: A full-funnel, two-platform system

  • Media Planning & Strategy
  • Ad Implementation & Setup

We anchored the whole program around a simple journey:

Dreaming → Planning → Booking

Then we mapped Meta Ads and Google Ads to each stage.

Dreaming – “Why North Okanagan?”

On Meta (Facebook + Instagram), we focused on thumb-stopping visuals—snowy trails, lakes, local food, slow-travel vibes—and let the creative do the heavy lifting. These campaigns were all about:

  • Cost-efficient reach in priority markets
  • Introducing the region’s story and communities
  • Building large warm audiences for retargeting later

On Google, Dreaming campaigns ran on Display and Demand Gen to keep the region visible while people browsed and watched content elsewhere online.

Planning – “What could my trip look like?”
Once someone had interacted with our Dreaming layer, we moved them into Planning:

  • Meta campaigns promoting itineraries, “local tips” stories, winter getaways, and things to do
  • Google Search campaigns capturing queries around activities, trails, and seasonal experiences

Here the goal was engagement and depth: get people onto the site, exploring content, and leaning into specific communities and seasons.

Booking – “Okay, let’s actually do this”
This is where performance really needed to shine. We:

  • Built Performance Max – Booking campaigns to optimise for high-value actions
  • Layered in Planning + Booking search campaigns to capture clear travel intent
  • Tracked key referrals to partner’s booking pages.

The Booking layer became the engine room of the account—fed by Dreaming and Planning audiences from both Meta and Google.

What happened in the numbers

Across the first year, Google Ads delivered:

  • 7× increase in booking-related actions
  • 8 – 9x Increase in conversion rate
  • Roughly a 90% drop in cost per conversion

In plain language:

We got much pickier about who saw lower-funnel ads, and much better at matching ad messaging to intent. The result was far more bookings and partner referrals, for a fraction of the original cost.

Meta Ads: Always-on inspiration at very low CPMs

Over the same period, Meta delivered:

  • More than 180,000 clicks
  • An average CPC of about CAD $0.38
  • An average CPM of roughly CAD $1.70

Meta’s job wasn’t just “cheap traffic”—it was filling remarketing pools and feeding Google’s lower-funnel machine with genuinely engaged travellers.

Why this matters for DMOs

For Explore North Okanagan, this wasn’t about a one-off seasonal campaign. It was about building a system that:

  • Keeps the region visible year-round
  • Guides potential visitors from “that looks nice” to “we’ve booked the trip”
  • Gives partners and stakeholders clear, performance-led reporting on how digital is driving results

By lining up Meta and Google around a shared funnel, we turned beautiful brand storytelling into a predictable, efficient engine for awareness, engagement, and bookings.

If you’re a DMO or tourism board and you’re wondering how to get from “we’re running ads” to “we have a full funnel that actually moves the needle,” we’d love to chat about what this kind of setup could look like for your destination.


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