Case study/Tourism
Paddywagon Tours
One shoot day on the road to the Cliffs of Moher, and an 8.74× return on Meta.
- Sector
- Tourism and day tours
- Route
- Dublin to the Cliffs of Moher
- What we did
- Shoot, vertical ads, Meta campaign, tracking
- Shoot day
- 8 July 2026
- Website
- paddywagontours.com
Return on ad spend as reported by Meta Ads Manager, 16 July to 2 October 2026.
About the project
Paddywagon Tours has been showing people around Ireland since 1998. They wanted to find out whether Meta could sell seats on their Cliffs of Moher day tour, so we ran the test end to end: one shoot, a set of vertical ads, and the tracking to show what came back.
We filmed the tour the way a passenger lives it, from the morning pickup on O'Connell Street to the edge of the Cliffs, and cut it into short ads for Facebook and Instagram. The ads were live eight days after the shoot and ran until 2 October.
Selected work
6 filmsThe shoot day
We had one day, one coach and one run at the Cliffs of Moher. Then the fog came in.
It left us with a decision to make on the spot: stand everyone down and try for another day, or go and trust the west of Ireland to be kind. We made the call to shoot. And thankfully, by the mercy of the gods above, the sun split the clouds. Every shot you see here was filmed that day.
We ran two units. One travelled with our presenter and Seamus, the leprechaun who rides on the dashboard, and got every line to camera, on the coach and off it. The other sat behind the bus in a crew car with the drone in the air, tracking the green coach along the Atlantic coast road.
All of the drone work was flown with approval from the Irish Aviation Authority (IAA).
How we made it
0301Is the Cliffs of Moher worth it?Social ad · 0:32
The question every first-time visitor asks, answered at the Cliffs themselves. It carried more than half of the campaign and returned 7.03×.
- Format
- 9:16
- Runs on
- Meta
02Five reasonsSocial ad · 0:44
The reasons to book, told on location: on the coach, with the driver, at the Cliffs and on a harbour quay. It returned 12.51×.
- Format
- 9:16
- Runs on
- Meta
03Built to be recutProduction
Every hook, reason and call to action was filmed as its own clean take, so the edit could mix them into different ads without a second trip west.
- Format
- 9:16
- Runs on
- Meta
The campaign
We built the Meta campaign and the tracking behind it, gave the client a live dashboard from the first week, and sent written reports through the season.
Two audiences, one tour
Campaigns aimed at people in the United States and in Ireland ran side by side, and both came back at around eight times what went in: 7.97× and 8.01×.
Retargeting did the closing
People who had been on the site but hadn't booked saw the ads again. That audience returned 15.94×, the strongest in the account.
Eight days from shoot to live
Filmed on 8 July, edited and live by 16 July, right in the middle of the season.
Tracking that holds up
Bookings report to Meta from the browser and the server, matched so each one counts once. The figures come from real bookings, recorded after payment went through.
