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marine

Sydney Harbour's #1-ranked boat training company still had a broken tracking pixel. Here is what we fixed first.

#1 organic
For "boat lessons sydney" and "boat training sydney", Boatwise's core commercial terms.
200+ 5-star reviews
A strong brand walking in the door, undermined by broken measurement.
3.63%+ CTR
The winning new creative concept, against 1.38% on the old, misattributed campaign.
$0.61 CPC
Down from $1.65 on the old campaign, once the correct pixel was firing.

Client context

Boatwise is a Sydney Harbour boat training company based at d'Albora Marinas, Mosman, run by Captain Tristian Mooney. Private boat tuition, powerboat handling and NSW boat licence courses, with 200+ five-star reviews and a genuinely strong organic search position already in place before Northstar came on.

The challenge

Boatwise walked in with real assets: the site already ranked #1 organically for its two most important commercial terms, and the brand had built a strong review base. But the ad account was flying blind. Tristian had three separate tracking pixels connected to the account, and the campaign spending real money was firing the wrong one, meaning every lead and cost-per-lead number the business had been looking at was measuring the wrong thing entirely. On top of that, Tristian believed his Meta spend was running at $440 to $500 a month. It was actually $1,840.

What we built

We fixed the pixel attribution first: correctly wired Boatwise's actual pixel into the account and rebuilt the Private Tuition and retargeting campaigns as one consolidated, correctly-tracked campaign. That gave the business its first clean, trustworthy data baseline, the old numbers weren't a benchmark worth keeping, they were measuring noise. On the content side, we ran creative concepts against each other under the new clean tracking and found a clear winner: a "docking anxiety" hook that speaks directly to the exact fear new boat owners have, outperforming the previous best-performing angle on every metric that mattered. Alongside paid media, we took on ongoing technical SEO and AIO work: H1 fixes, blog content and backend cleanup, to protect and build on the organic position Boatwise already owned.

Results

Once the correct pixel was firing, the new campaign's winning creative pulled a 3.63%+ link click-through rate against the old campaign's 1.38%, at a cost per click of $0.61 against $1.65 previously, a real, verified improvement, not a reporting artifact. Boatwise's organic search position, #1 for its two most important commercial search terms, remains protected and is the platform the paid media now builds on top of, rather than competing against.

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โ€œA complete growth engine: CRM refresh, paid campaigns, content programme and site SEO under one strategy.โ€

Tristian Mooney, Founder & Head Trainer

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