The Hardest Destination Marketing Metric to Prove? Whether Your Ads Actually Got People to Visit

Destination marketers have no shortage of numbers to put in a campaign report. Impressions, click-through rates, video completions, website visits, engagement. You could present those metrics all day to a room of stakeholders and still leave one question hanging in the room: Did any of those people actually come to your destination?

That’s the measurement challenge a large U.S. tourism board set out to tackle when it launched a summer campaign aimed at bringing more out-of-state visitors to the city. Particularly important given that summer had historically been its lowest-visitation period.

The campaign ultimately produced a 7.5% lift in visitors, according to VDX.tv, which partnered with location-data company Cuebiq to conduct a footfall attribution study. Perhaps even more telling, 39.7% of those visitors traveled more than 445 miles to reach the destination.

Translation: The ads helped get people on the ground.

Here’s what destination marketers can take from it:

• Stop treating engagement as the finish line.

First, a bit of mystery, as exactly which U.S. tourism board VDX.tv assisted remains unclear. (The case study anonymizes the destination.)

We do know, however, that the campaign wasn’t simply designed to rack up video views or clicks. The creative incorporated destination-specific interests like landmarks, family friendly activities, dining, and nightlife while giving viewers tools to move beyond inspiration and into trip planning with just one additional click.

That approach reflects a broader shift in how destinations are thinking about video, according to VDX.tv’s Director of Client Partnerships, Travel, Jackie Dunfee.

“Video content has long been one of the best storytelling formats to inspire travelers to visit, through amplifying the vast array of experiences on offer within their destination,” Dunfee said.

In this case, the video units included an “Official Visitor’s Guide" and dedicated “Upcoming Events” tab, putting destination information directly in front of potential travelers rather than relying on them to seek it out elsewhere.

VDX.tv also engineered a “Create Itinerary” call to action button within the video ads, designed to move prospective visitors from, “I’d like to go there,” to, “Here’s what I’d do when I get there.”

That distinction matters, because for DMOs, the question isn’t simply whether an ad captures attention. What happens next? In other words, does your advertising have somewhere to take a potential visitor?

As Dunfee put it: “That's really the difference between video-for-awareness and video-for-conversion, and it's a big part of why we saw the visitation lift we did.”

It’s also why Dunfee sees video as particularly well-suited to destination marketing.

“As for whether every DMO should be leaning into video right now: yes absolutely,” she added. “Travel is one of the most visually driven purchase decisions there is, people need to see themselves in a destination before they'll commit to booking.”

• Your media strategy should reflect the people you’re actually trying to move.

VDX.tv’s campaign made a deliberate choice about who it wanted to reach. Rather than simply buying broad awareness, VDX.tv specifically targeted out-of-state travelers, building a custom audience using travel interests and behavioral data.

Even so, that’s only half of the equation. The other half is meeting them when they’re actually paying attention.

“One of the best ways to capture attention in a doomscrolling world is to tease out short- and long-form video content across different platforms, and not just the obvious choices like Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, but also across travel and lifestyle content websites while a traveler is actively reading and engaging with articles of interest,” Dunfee said.

It begs the bigger question for destination marketers: Are DMOs still spending too much money trying to reach everyone?

For a destination trying to solve a seasonal visitation problem, maximum reach may not be the most meaningful objective. The better target may be the people who are geographically, behaviorally, and financially capable of actually making the trip during that specific window.

It’s a distinction David Aldridge, the vice president of marketing at Visit Virginia’s Blue Ridge, has discussed with eTourism. The destination has increasingly looked at the value of reaching travelers with the disposable income and inclination to visit and spend, rather than simply chasing younger audiences.

Aldridge believes it’s become a challenge for DMOs to step away from marketing messaging that isolates older demographics. That doesn’t make younger travelers irrelevant. But it underscores a fundamental marketing challenge: Are you targeting the people you want to engage, or the people most likely to convert?

Those audiences aren’t necessarily the same.

• The holy grail is connecting media exposure to feet on the ground.

Ultimately, that 7.5% figure gets at a much bigger shift happening in destination marketing.

Beyond marketing performance, DMOs are increasingly being asked to prove real economic impact.

A million impressions can demonstrate reach. A healthy click-through rate can demonstrate engagement. But neither necessarily answers the question that a tourism board may ultimately care about the most: Did our marketing bring people here?

The talking point isn’t unique to VDX.tv.

Tourism Economics, for example, also recently published a case study on its work with Experience Scottsdale to connect marketing activity with actual visitation outcomes by comparing exposed users with a control group.

Aldridge also worked with Tourism Economics on Virginia’s Blue Ridge’s latest holiday campaign, using data to evaluate whether the campaign could drive visitation during its shoulder season.

VDX.tv, meanwhile, lists the Arizona Office of Tourism, Wyoming Office of Tourism, and Visit Syracuse among its major tourism and travel clients.

Not sure where your DMO should start? Dunfee’s answer is not to treat video as a one-size-fits-all awareness play, but to match the format to where a traveler is in the decision-making process.

“Map video to the traveler journey,” she advised. "Short-form, high-impact creative to spark inspiration and get discovered, then longer-form or interactive video experiences (guides, itineraries, events) once someone's shown intent, so you're capturing them further down the funnel too.”

And the final piece—measurement. “Just as importantly, pairing that creative with real attribution, like the suite of 3rd party visitation studies we layer onto campaigns, so you're not just guessing at impact, you can actually tie the media back to true visitation,” Dunfee concluded.

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