For destination marketing executives, the toughest part of the job is bridging the gap between action and outcome. We spend millions to engage and attract, yet we are forced to justify that investment with metrics that feel hollow.
Impressions, clicks, and website sessions are measures of output, not impact. They tell us if our advertising was seen, not if it worked. In this era of fiscal accountability, where stakeholders scrutinize how every dollar is spent, “we drove a lot of traffic” is no longer a sufficient outcome.
The message is clear: We must move beyond impressions and all the old metrics. We have to start proving our campaigns attract visitors who contribute to the local economy.
A Unique Challenge
To understand why this challenge is unique to destination marketing, you only have to look at how other industries can measure their effectiveness. Take eCommerce, for example. Its marketing has a linear path from ad engagement to cart to conversion.
In destination marketing, however, the “purchase” is fragmented, long-term, and often offline.
A family’s decision to visit might be influenced by a dozen touchpoints — a streaming TV ad, an influencer’s social post, a search query, an article on a travel blog — spread over weeks or months.
Unlike eCommerce, the final conversion is an arrival, not a click. Instead, it’s a family piling into a car or stepping off a plane. In any case, it’s an event that happens entirely disconnected from the digital ad they saw six weeks prior.
Prying Open the Black Box
This “black box” of the traveler journey is what has made attribution seem impossible. And that’s the problem that visitation attribution platforms are built to solve. This new generation of SaaS solutions is finally prying open the black box, allowing us to establish a measurable link between media exposure and a presence in a given destination.
These data platforms bypass proxy metrics and focus directly on visitation. They empower DMOs to answer critical questions, such as:
- Did the audiences who saw our campaign actually arrive?
- What is the economic impact of visitors in our destination?
- Which markets, platforms, and creative messages were most effective at driving that visitation?
- What was our actual cost per arrival?
The New Attribution Ecosystem
The visitation attribution ecosystem is evolving quickly, and each platform approaches the problem from a different angle. Some providers, such as Zartico, Madden Media’s Voyage suite, and the Symphony Intelligence Platform from Tourism Economics, focus on integrating multiple tourism, economic, and mobility datasets into a single decision-making view. These platforms pull together sources like geolocation and mobility signals, lodging performance, spend data, and website behavior to help destinations understand who visits, how they move through the destination, and what they contribute economically.
Other solutions specialize in specific stages of the traveler journey. Amadeus Navigator360 provides forward-looking visibility into hotel and air booking activity, allowing destination marketers to monitor demand, pacing, and competitive benchmarks before travelers arrive. Journey intelligence platforms like Arrivalist use mobile device and connected-car data to measure real-world visitation and quantify the incremental lift created by advertising through exposed versus control group analysis.
A smaller group of platforms focuses on true media-to-revenue attribution. Adara’s Impact product links digital advertising and website engagement directly to verified travel transactions such as hotel stays, flight bookings, length of stay, and in-market spending, using data from its global travel cooperative. These solutions allow destinations to move beyond visit counts and tie marketing dollars directly to economic return.
Viewing the Entire Funnel
The appeal of these attribution tools is not just that they finally provide a credible ROI number. Their real power comes from helping destinations understand the broader economic impact of their marketing and make smarter, more strategic decisions going forward. While a post-campaign scorecard is valuable, another advantage comes from understanding how marketing influences visitation, spend, and community outcomes — insights that shape smarter planning, investment, and messaging over time.
In our campaign work at Watauga Group, we’ve used data from several of these tools to map the marketing funnel for our destination clients. This holistic view revealed dynamics that might have otherwise gone unnoticed.
For example, we found that upper-funnel tactics like streaming media generated inspiration and had a higher cost per arrival. At the same time, lower-funnel endemic partners like TripAdvisor and Expedia were highly efficient at converting in-market travel planners.
A New Approach to Audience Targeting
In this case, a CMO looking only at direct-conversion metrics might be tempted to cut the “inefficient” streaming budget. But a full-funnel attribution view can prove that cutting the top of the funnel would starve the high-converting media partners at the bottom. This has a transformative impact on media planning.
Now we can also use the data not just to validate that our core geo-targeted markets are responding, but also to identify emerging opportunity markets. When we see a statistically significant lift in visitation from a market we aren’t actively targeting, we now have a data-driven case for expanding our geostrategy and aligning it with seasonality.
By analyzing “Average Days to Arrival” data, we gain visibility into different market-planning windows. We might see that Atlanta visitors plan 30 days out, while Chicago visitors plan 90 days out. Armed with this information, we know our strategically flighted campaigns will have maximum impact instead of relying on assumptions.
Challenges Remain
Even with the progress these visitation and attribution platforms bring, no single solution gives DMOs a perfect, all-knowing view of their marketing impact. Each platform has strengths, but also limitations that require realistic expectations and thoughtful interpretation.
One of the biggest hurdles is still the inability to fully measure the influence of “walled garden” channels such as Meta, YouTube, and other closed ecosystems. These platforms restrict the sharing of user-level data, which means their true contribution to visitation, bookings, and spend often remains partially hidden. As a result, it is still difficult to account for the full, cross-channel effect of an integrated campaign.
There is also the reality that much of the tourism data powering these systems is paneled, modeled, or probabilistic rather than a complete census. These platforms are not a perfect mirror of every traveler or every purchase. Instead, the value lies in the directional intelligence they provide — a clearer, more defensible understanding of what is happening, even if the final decimal point is not exact.
The encouraging truth is that perfection is no longer required in order to act with confidence. For the first time, DMOs can move beyond assumptions and anecdotes and ground marketing decisions in real visitation, spending, and behavioral signals. The goal is not flawless measurement, but measurably better insight — and these tools finally make that possible.
A Common Language
The best news is that these platforms provide DMOs with a common language to share with their stakeholders.
When a DMO’s marketing team can walk into a stakeholder meeting and change the conversation from “we served 50 million impressions” to “our peak-season summer campaign drove 40,000 incremental visitors from our key target markets, who stayed an average of 3.5 nights, and invested $2 million in our economy,” the entire dynamic changes.
So, while the gap between action and outcome hasn’t been entirely erased, DMOs who embrace attribution will at least be speaking a more impactful language that all can understand and find value in. The challenge for leaders at this moment is to move our organizations — and our partners — beyond the comfort of the old metrics and into the world of data-driven attribution.
