The performance of your marketing campaigns has myriad implications; beyond insights into the effectiveness of the campaigns themselves, positive performance can increase your overall marketing budget, elevate the profile of your destination, and prove your destination marketing organization’s (DMO) value to stakeholders and elected officials. But too often, the questions keeping tourism organizations up at night are topics like: What are the right metrics? What data is going to be compelling enough to get your stakeholders’ attention? How can you stand out to consumers?
With summer travel in full swing, now is an opportune moment to assess the performance of your spring and summer campaigns, the metrics you are prioritizing and how consumers are interacting with your advertising. While tracking metrics like website clicks, click-through rate (CTR) and impression delivery remain vital for monitoring and measuring performance, it is equally important to delve into conversion-based metrics, such as bookings and searches.
These metrics are more comprehensive and are more indicative of how visitors progress through the marketing and sales funnel after being exposed to your media. By analyzing conversion-based data, you can gain deeper insights into the effectiveness of your marketing efforts and make informed decisions to enhance your overall campaign performance.
Let’s take a closer look at three metrics that can help you better understand performance and make the necessary optimizations based on meaningful insights:
Understanding the Performance of Audiences
It is essential to understand which audience segments respond most favorably to your media. Adopting a non-discriminatory approach to audience segmentation and budgeting may not yield optimal results, as targeted, segment-specific budgeting is more likely to significantly increase your returns.
With the Adara Impact platform, you can gain a better understanding of the performance and ROI of your marketing efforts, as well as the extent to which different audience segments contribute to impressions and conversions. In the example below, the 40-49 age group performs well, accounting for more than 63% of conversions (bookings) despite representing only 39.6% of the overall impressions. As an advertiser, you may choose to continue allocating the budget to this group or explore the potential of an underperforming group, such as the 30-39 audience as an opportunity to enhance the performance for a segment you wish to target with your media exposure.
Similarly, household income (HHI) data can help you understand the performance for specific income groups. The chart below shows that the $150K-$199K HHI range performs slightly better when comparing conversions to the percentage of impressions. Understanding these metrics in real time enables proper optimization of campaigns across all your marketing efforts.
Understanding Top Origin Markets and Hotel Stay Dispersion
At the outset of your campaign planning, you likely conducted tireless market research to understand where your travelers originate from and who you want to target. During and at the campaign’s end, this practice is essential to determining whether your efforts to target a desired market were successful.
Adara Impact can help you gain in-depth insights into the geographic locations reached by your media, allowing you to better understand whether you effectively reached your intended audience. Within Impact, you can also assess whether those who traveled to your destination stayed within the intended geographic area. This is particularly crucial for DMOs overseeing larger geographic regions such as counties, regions, and states.
Understanding Alternative Bookings and Searches
OK – so you know who is booking and searching for hotels and flights to your destination. Mission accomplished, right? Not quite. To get a full picture of your marketing efforts, it is key to understand your competitors as well. With Impact, you can have visibility into those visitors who are further down the marketing funnel, including those who search for your destination and consider destinations within your competitive set. This level of insight is crucial when determining your marketing strategy and during the media planning phase.
At Adara, we understand the importance of measuring your campaign’s success and your marketing efforts overall. Furthermore, we understand that you are at the mercy of your stakeholders’ and elected officials’ marketing and tourism goals – Adara can help you better understand what metrics and measurement tactics will help in meeting these goals. Contact Adara today for more information on these strategies and for a demo of the newly updated Impact platform.