Zeek Coleman
Senior Director, Product Marketing,
Adara
You may have seen popups on Facebook this winter asking you to opt-in to ad tracking. These messages were shown because Facebook is worried that they won’t be able to collect data on their app users across iPhones. Apple’s recent iPhone update IOS 14.5 stops apps from being able to use tracking and targeting unless a user opts in. And so far, only about 4% of users seem to be opting in. For tourism marketers, the pain is real – we need to be able to target our messages and measure our performance, or we’ll have a lot of media spend wasted.
More than that, Google’s deprecation of cookies (not the sweet kind) means the web as we know it will probably break in the same way – less targeting, less tracking, less measurement. You know that DMA or state-targeted campaign you want to run? It won’t work anymore. And those location based attribution reports you use to understand which partners drove more visits? You won’t have access to as much data as you used to…
…Unless, you have first party, privacy compliant, data with users who opted in. That’s where Adara comes in. Adara has been working with it’s data partners to switch over to the future since 2019. And so we have more data than ever, with a solution that doesn’t get affected by changes from Apple and Google.
We’re also excited to announce a partnership that incorporates the total credit card spend of users that saw your marketing. And what’s really cool – we can break it up by merchant category (restaurants, lodging, etc) and you can apply that to any media you run for a holistic view into your market. It’s also platform agnostic. So if you want to see how much your visitors spent, or who saw your ads via certain advertising channels or campaigns, we can show you.
This is essential at a time like this when DMO budgets have never been under more scrutiny. And it’s an opportunity to prove that marketing is not just about pretty pictures and creative campaigns, but we’re digitally savvy, proactive and ahead of Google and Apple’s curve.
I can tell you from experience because I’ve worked with all of your favorite digital partners in tourism, partners like Adara are the most relentless I’ve seen when it comes to keeping tourism clients informed and equipped to handle changes in the future. I’ve never been one to sugarcoat things, so believe me when I say, I couldn’t be more proud to be on a team solving for these challenges.
To help all of us get up to speed on these challenges and equip our industry to explain them in more simple terms, I have a curriculum that I trained my team at Visit Savannah with prior to joining Adara and they really appreciated it. If you’d be interested in having me do the same for you or your team, please don’t hesitate to reach out. It includes everything from SEO to Vendor Negotiation, to equip you to be armed for any conversation – some that may already be happening. If this would be of interest, feel free to reach out to me directly at Zeek.Coleman@Adara.com.