Complex Attribution/Digital Tracking and SEO Strategy

About Rocky Mountaineer

Rocky Mountaineer offers luxury train journeys through the majestic landscapes of the Canadian Rockies and the American Southwest. Rocky Mountaineer provides unparalleled service and comfort, immersing guests in the natural beauty and cultural heritage of the regions. Dedicated to excellence, each journey is carefully crafted to ensure every detail enhances the guest experience. As a leader in innovative travel, Rocky Mountaineer is committed to providing sustainable and unforgettable adventures that celebrate the grandeur of the great outdoors.

Client Challenges

When Rocky Mountaineer partnered with 1UP, they needed a strategic approach to enhance their digital marketing effectiveness, specifically in tracking and search engine optimization. Their existing setup lacked the necessary structure and insights to support data-driven decision-making and sustainable organic growth.

From a tracking perspective, they required accurate marketing attribution across their complex booking and CRM ecosystem. This included refining their data infrastructure, optimizing e-commerce tracking, and streamlining their analytics framework to provide clear insights into user behavior across multiple touchpoints while providing a seamless transition to Google Analytics 4.

On the SEO front, Rocky Mountaineer needed a scalable approach to strengthen their website’s technical foundation and content strategy, enabling them to capture and convert organic traffic more effectively without over-reliance on paid media. They sought a strategy to expand their organic search presence beyond branded terms, improving visibility and control over high-value search traffic.

Our Digital Marketing Strategy

In order to improve organic traffic and attribution in a competitive luxury travel market, our campaign ideas included:

A New SEO Approach

We implemented a data-driven SEO strategy for Rocky Mountaineer, focusing on technical optimizations and a content plan to improve search rankings and online visibility. By conducting competitive benchmarks, identifying content gaps, and refining keyword strategies, we helped enhance their discoverability and drive significant organic growth.

More Bang For The Buck

We continue to drive Rocky Mountaineer’s SEO success by optimizing their content and technical performance, ensuring sustained organic growth and improved search rankings. As a result, our strong SEO performance has reduced reliance on paid ads for some competitive keywords, lowering PPC spend while increasing visibility, traffic, and sales.

E-Commerce Tracking

The tracking strategy for Rocky Mountaineer began with the crucial setup of e-commerce tracking. We wrote custom e-commerce events data layer code to enable tagging of each step of the checkout process in Google Tag Manager and push checkout events and transactional data into GA4.

Structure To Chaos

To meet the Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4 transition deadline, we prioritized essential tracking goals to ensure seamless data continuity. After a comprehensive audit, we streamlined Google Tag Manager by refining events, tags, and triggers for a more efficient tracking environment.

Dynamic Reporting

A new dynamic reporting template was designed in Google Looker Studio to consolidate KPIs and extract meaningful insights from GA4 and Google Search Console.

Cookie Compliance

We conducted audits focused on customer journey and user cookie consent compliance, ensuring a seamless and compliant user experience and compliance with complex international cookie consent requirements.

Tailored Training

We empowered the Rocky Mountaineer team to understand the capabilities of GA4 through specialized training sessions, complemented by custom reports and dashboards tailored for these training initiatives.

Tailored Support

As the need for tracking evolves with changes to the website and shifts in Rocky Mountaineer’s strategic priorities, our team continuously adapts, providing custom tagging solutions, reporting, and insights.

SEO Results

+372%

Increase in non-branded traffic

+80%

Unique keywords ranking

+222%

Transactions from organic

Tracking Results

Tagging

We tagged a multitude of key events and secondary events on the main site, the customer portal, and the agent portal, leading to more attribution to understanding of user behaviour across the sites.

E-commerce Flow

We mapped out and tagged the e-commerce checkout flow, from a package list view to purchase, and created an e-commerce funnel report showing friction points progress between each step of the checkout process.

Cookie Consent

Cookie Consent Mode V2 was adopted for different locations and set up across the main site and the checkout subdomain achieving compliance with different consent regulations and respecting user privacy.

Testimonial

1UP is one of the best agencies I’ve had the pleasure of working with. They consistently go above and beyond to deliver high-quality work that produces excellent results.

The team at 1UP really takes the time to understand our business and objectives, so their work always feels appropriate and tailored to our goals. They took the time to understand the various and complex nuances of our operations, our website, our other technical partners, which meant they could adjust to our needs and limitations. They are clear subject matter experts, it’s evident from their recommendations that they have a deep knowledge of their field, which we can see reflected in their work and the results.

Emily Crick | Manager, Digital Marketing & Media, Rocky Mountaineer