“The industry is so fragmented,” said Esra Calvert, Virginia Tourism Corporation’s Director of Research, when asked to describe her biggest challenge in tracking Virginia’s ad effectiveness. “We are working with so many diversified vendors from big to small, and it can be difficult to bridge the data in real time.”
Though a 360-degree picture is still out of reach, Calvert uses a combination of measurement tools, including traditional survey and big data tools like Adara, and Arrivalist, to get her as close as possible.
Using a profile of her target market, Calvert surveys a panel of respondents to measure paid, owned, and earned media.
Virginia’s survey data shows that one out of two travelers recalls the DMO’s social media content, which primarily comes from the virginia.org blog. Adara, a tracking tool that Calvert uses, demonstrates that this blog accounts for 11% of hotel revenue, based on impressions tracked in 2017.
“Not only we have seen conversion from booking data, we have also seen that consumers booked hotels at 50% higher rates than average [as a result of the campaign.]”
To mitigate any misattribution, Calvert uses Arrivalist, which uses cookies to track the location of mobile devices to measure “arrivals.” This allows DMOs to demonstrate a connection between the ads they are buying and the people who arrive in the destination. Arrivalist uses the metric Arrivals per 1,000 impressions (APM) to measure arrival rate.
Using Arrivalist, Calvert’s team has been able to show that the virginia.org blog’s efficiency rate is 53% higher than the benchmark arrival rate for Virginia’s website visitor (1.03 APM versus 0.67 APM.)
Virginia’s survey backs up this finding. Calvert said, “those who are exposed to integrated marketing (paid, earned and owned media) consider and intend to visit Virginia at higher rates – 11 percent and 12 percent more respectively – compared to those who were not exposed to integrated marketing.”
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