A destination’s website is one of its most important assets, acting as a storefront or virtual welcome center to connect potential visitors with all the destination has to offer.
The website is the destination’s primary opportunity to educate and influence visitors. And destination marketers invest accordingly, focusing time and resources to make this asset the best it can be.
But unlike their e-commerce counterparts, destination websites rarely capture the final sale. So how can destination marketers manage their websites to effectively encourage and shape visitation? How can they best listen to what their website data is telling them?
Zartico’s Website Attribution tool connects website engagement with real-world destination visits to help marketers understand which content converts and how actual travelers are using it. These insights are crucial to developing impactful marketing strategies backed by reliable data.
5 ways to optimize your website strategies to drive in-destination conversions
Website Attribution opens new possibilities for destination marketers to generate meaningful impact.
1. Make content decisions based on actual visitor behavior
Tools like Google Analytics offer many helpful metrics for understanding the overall health of your website. But they don’t allow you to filter out web traffic that is less relevant to your strategies — including visits from people who never travel to the destination, or locals who may be browsing your event calendar or trail guides.
Isolating the web activities of people who actually show up in your destination allows you to see which content categories and pages resonate most with visitors. These insights enable you to enhance content that is working, tweak what isn’t, and create new content that will engage your targeted audience.
2. Understand how your website influences travel patterns
Use ZDOS® to consider visitation by regions or neighborhoods, then compare the behavior of visitors who visited your website before traveling and those who didn’t.
Discover opportunities to use website content to encourage visitors to explore different areas of your destination. Similarly, compare digital campaigns to see which paid content motivates disbursement, then adjust according to your goals.
3. Schedule marketing efforts to meet visitors in the planning cycle
Zartico’s View-to-Visit Window measures the time between a traveler’s first visit to your website and their arrival in your destination. Understanding this timing is key to developing effective campaign strategies that align with visitors’ planning period, ensuring that your content reaches them at just the right time.
Explore View-to-Visit Window by season or by origin market to better target marketing efforts. Or use the Visitor Funnel insight to understand how travelers access your site in the weeks and months leading up to their visit.
💡 Pro tip: Compare your View-to-Visit Window with your Booking Window (available with Zartico Lodging Data) for even more context. Are travelers visiting your website to find inspiration for a potential trip, or using it to flesh out the itinerary of a trip they’ve already booked?
4. Drill into content categories to connect visitor interests with destination experiences
Zartico’s system uses natural language processing (a branch of AI) to automatically tag each page of your website with a content category. We use the same categories across website, geolocation, and spending data, allowing you to see how website behavior correlates to in-destination movement.
Analyze your top-converting website content topics to pinpoint opportunities for improvement or to find data-backed recommendations for your next campaign creative.
💭 Good to know: Consistent categories are just one element of Zartico’s Place-Based Strategy, the tested methodologies and expert standards we use to activate our four integrated data sets.
5. Plan, measure, and optimize effective digital campaigns
Origin market insights highlight the markets most likely to view your website before arriving in the destination. Use these insights to inform your selection of quality visit markets for your next campaign.
Refer to Website Attribution insights to understand which of your digital marketing campaigns drive the most visitation to your destination. Evaluate the effectiveness of various campaign types, comparing brand awareness campaigns to more specific initiatives like seasonal promotions highlighting local events.
Finally, compare the influence of organic search visitors — those with general brand awareness — with those driven by targeted digital media. Do visitors behave differently based on how they found your website? This insight helps you understand the power of your paid campaigns in driving targeted visitation versus more general, organic search traffic.
How Website Attribution works
Zartico’s Website Attribution is designed to provide detailed, actionable insights while prioritizing accuracy and privacy.
In-destination visits are measured through Zartico Geolocation Data, which is collected anonymously from mobile devices before being thoroughly cleaned, balanced, and verified. (Read about our patent-pending normalization and hotspot filtering methodologies.)
These geolocation observations are linked with website visits through a process called IP bridging. This important process captures conversions even if the website visit happens on a different device (ex: a home-based laptop) than the one that is observed in the destination (ex: a smartphone).
No personally identifiable information is ever passed to Zartico or our clients, maintaining the highest possible levels of privacy and security.
Use connected data to create better visitor content
Zartico’s Website Attribution isn’t another analytics tool. It looks beyond sessions and user counts to provide reach and conversion insights you can use to optimize your website and your broader digital presence.
The insights are built on a strong foundation of reliable geolocation data, verified by a team of dedicated data scientists. Understanding your website data in a new light creates new opportunities to creatively capture travelers’ imaginations and connect them with experiences only your destination can offer.
Your destination website has a lot to tell you — are you listening?
Find out how Destination Madison used ZDOS® and Website Attribution to develop a strategic, data-backed annual content plan fueled by compelling storytelling and designed to capture quality visits.