As stated in the ADARA study, “DMOs and tourism boards are continuously tasked with justifying their overall spend and business impact, or return on investment (ROI). However, the media landscape is fragmented across channels and measurement capabilities, and these organizations have very little visibility into true travel outcomes.”
Evaluating destination marketing organization websites
ADARA’s Site Impact is a new analytics tool designed specifically for destination marketing organizations (DMOs) to optimize their campaigns and websites in order to reach global travelers. ADARA is the travel industry’s leading data co-operative, with the world’s largest aggregation of global travel data, insight, and partnerships with some of the most renowned travel businesses. Site Impact is designed to “fill a major gap in DMO marketing and investment, allowing destination marketers to understand how destination websites help influence travelers, and how much they spend as a result.”
Here are the ADARA's Site Impact study results
To prove the effectiveness of the tool, ADARA worked with the Bloomington, Minnesota DMO to analyze the power and influence of its destination website. The tool reviewed nearly 44,000 travel searches and 1,200 flight and hotel bookings in May and June 2016 to obtain a closer look at marketing strategies, their specific traveler audience, and overall website effectiveness. This allowed the team to attribute length of stay and total spend to the travelers they were attracting and booking, while exploring the exact drivers of high booking rates. The visitor profiles they found also provided a benchmark for competitive data and subsequent pricing standards. The Bloomington DMO uncovered tons of useful sales and marketing data. Some of the biggest findings were:
- 44% of bookings were business trips.
- The average traveler spent 2.1 days at the destination.
- $152 was the ADR per booked room.
- Visitors to the website spent between one and two weeks searching for venues.
- 62% of travelers who visited the website booked within three days.
- Of the 72,103 unique visitors to the website during those two months, 975 booked hotels in Bloomington generating $315k in revenue.
- Bloomington’s conversion rate of website visits to hotel bookings was 1.35%.
The study also ranked Bloomington’s feeder markets, the origin destinations of its guests. The top feeder market was Chicago, with 8.8% of total bookings and an ADR of $161. This level of visibility helps DMOs “guide future marketing strategies by allocating budget across priority channels and optimizing spend, while also improving results.”
It’s no surprise that a wider view of your digital marketing assets can improve overall destination marketing strategy. If you’re interested in improving your property or destination’s bottom line, check out Cvent’s free Group Business Trends aggregator to examine the health of your market today.
Up next, learn about the best ways to use analytics for destination marketing.
