The NCAA basketball tournament is upon us again, and college loyalists are traveling across the country in shows of support for their favorite teams.
Here’s how the Arizona Office of Tourism used travel data to quantify the impact of its March Madness advertising campaigns for travel to Phoenix in 2017 - and similarly, how destinations can “connect dots” to demonstrate ROI in an era of continuing cost-cutting and intensive focus on destination marketing budgets.
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The NCAA’s Final Four, the crescendo of college basketball season, was held in Phoenix in 2017. The Arizona Office of Tourism, a government agency responsible for driving travel to the Grand Canyon state, wanted to track its campaign promoting the Final Four to quantify the impact of its efforts on the state as a whole.
Arizona Tourism’s goal for the NCAA’s Final Four was to drive travel to the event and increase exposure of the state of Arizona as a travel destination. This was tracked through four KPIs:
- Hotel and flight bookings
- Hotel revenue (total revenue and ADR)
- Room nights
- Efficiency (impressions per booking)
The strategy
In order to show that travel to the state was directly linked to the NCAA Final Four promotion, the Arizona Office of Tourism needed to track confirmed flights and hotel bookings into the market.
Furthermore, to prove they were driving travel to the entire state and not just the Final Four host city of Phoenix, the office had to demonstrate that the campaign drove people to other parts of Arizona.
Data-centric, digital marketing analysis is now as simple as an uncontested layup to the hoop.
Scott Garner - ADARA
Destinations often promote events, but to date there hasn’t been a way to show the impact of these promotional efforts on driving travel to the larger destination. The Arizona Office of Tourism turned to ADARA Impact, a marketing measurement tool that uses real-time search and booking data from ADARA’s global travel data co-op to look at the true impact of the destination website and media campaigns on visitation, flight bookings and hotel revenue.
The ADARA team worked with Arizona’s destination marketers to develop a custom tracking strategy for their Final Four campaign and would compare the results against the general spring campaign.
The results
By connecting media impressions and clicks with ADARA’s travel data, Arizona was able to learn that the Final Four campaign influenced nearly 19,000 flight bookings to Arizona - bringing people from across the US who spent upwards of 88,700 nights in market.
Furthermore:
- A campaign investment of $35,000 influenced more than $4.75 million in hotel revenue, driving an ROI 135X. The ADR of visitors who were exposed to the Final Four campaign, as opposed to the general spring campaign, was $24 higher per-night at $207.
- The Final Four campaign drove 1.5X more efficient hotel and flight bookings (45% fewer impressions per hotel booking and 49% fewer impressions per flight booking).
- In addition to driving singular event travel, the Final Four campaign resulted in incremental travel to destinations across the state. More than 57% of bookings were to destinations other than the event host city of Phoenix.
The takeaways
Destination marketing is a massive international industry, with stakeholders ranging from hotels and airlines, to restaurants, attractions and other important swaths of local and regional economies.
Destination spending is a huge engine of economic growth. By attracting more people to visit destinations, tourism marketing helps create jobs, generate tax revenue, boost local real estate, agriculture, retail and more.
Now there are real-time measurement tools that directly connect marketing activity to revenue spent in a given market – making it simple for destination marketers to justify their digital marketing spends and demonstrate their value across travel points within a destination.
This can spur better daily decision making, and the right allocation of spends. It also enables DMOs to know exactly who their customers are, how they plan and travel and how they spend – long a bugaboo of online travel marketers.
As the example of the Arizona Office of Tourism demonstrates, data-centric, digital marketing analysis is now as simple as an uncontested layup to the hoop.