What DMOs Can Learn About Marketing Measurement from Adobe Part 2: The Challenges of Attribution
July 24, 2024
For DMOs, with no control over the final point of conversion, tracking success or return on investment isn’t always easy. The following is part two in a three-part series and focuses on the difficulties in pulling together data points to communicate marketing success. Part one in this series looks at Adobe’s model and how DMOs can apply it to manage and measure their marketing impact.
Before diving in, let’s review a few of the challenges we, and all marketers, face with attribution. Although we live in the ‘Golden Age’ of marketing data, an unfortunate side effect is the ‘data deluge.’ The information, insights, and numbers can get overwhelming — fast. We have metrics for everything, including options for attributing marketing spending to room nights, visitor spending, and physical arrivals via geolocation data. Additionally, we have excellent tools for measuring economic impact, brand awareness, and visitor perception. The closest KPI, however, that many DMOs have to an actual financial metric is tax revenue collection. Success is typically communicated through a mix of these data points, with the ultimate goal of correlating our efforts as DMOs to how much tax was collected year over year or the increase in the economic impact of tourism on our destinations.
However, several challenges must be considered — some unique to our field and others familiar to all marketers, regardless of industry:
Imperfect Attribution Models: No attribution model perfectly captures the multifaceted path to visitation. Unlike industries with clear financial conversion metrics and shorter paths to purchase, travel decisions often involve multiple touchpoints, a prolonged path to purchase, and various organizations (hotels, attractions, etc.). Even with conversion metrics, companies across all industries need help to choose an attribution model that best communicates the value of their marketing activities. There are at least seven attribution models used by Fortune 500 companies, ranging from the familiar (First Touch, Last Touch) to the more complex (Econometric, Position-Based). There’s no magic wand for attribution models. Still, a data-driven strategy aligned with key business objectives keeps the focus on overall goals over distracting data.
Emphasis on Bottom Funnel Tactics: About a decade ago, media vendors and marketing technology companies began offering impressive new ways to attribute marketing spend to desired visitor actions, like booking a room, spending money in the destination, or simply showing up (measured via geolocation data). This led to focusing more heavily on expensive (from a CPM perspective) media solutions that could provide impressive, attribution-focused after-action reporting. However, this emphasis on bottom-funnel tactics can lead to neglect of critical upper-funnel efforts, failing to account for the entire traveler’s journey from initial awareness to actual visits. Direct-to-consumer brands and even larger brands like Adobe need help with this balance; focusing on marketing tactics that appear to have a more immediate impact can be tempting. What Adobe learned through DDOM was to look at how investment further up the customer journey impacted efforts further down. It also helped create a more robust data narrative that supported investment in tactics in the Trial and Buy phases, but better connected how investments in social media, the website, and customer training programs impacted top-line financial metrics like annual revolving revenue (ARR).
Vanity Metrics: Upper funnel measurements often fall into the dreaded category of ”’vanity metrics,” such as impressions, reach, and likes. Because these marketing KPIs can’t be directly tied to a conversion point, we, as marketers (and our stakeholders), cast a wary eye towards impressively large numbers that don’t appear to do anything for our destinations. This misperception further feeds into the previous point made regarding lower-funnel tactics. The simple fact is that there are no “vanity metrics,” just misused or misunderstood metrics. The number of impressions deployed into a new growth origin market, where brand awareness is low, can support later, more expensive efforts to ultimately increase visitation. We often have KBOs established that identify growth targets for a given origin market, generally measured using geolocation data. This KBO might state, “Increase visitation from Atlanta to a 5% share of total visitation in the fiscal year.” Suppose you’ve read our earlier blog about utilizing KBOs and the Pyramid Principle. In that case, you’ll recall that a structure of tactics-oriented KPIs supports a KBO like the example above. How many impressions were deployed in Atlanta during the year? If we show large numbers of impressions deployed in the market, an increase in email sign-ups from the area, and web traffic growth…it becomes easier to correlate a successful completion of the KBO to our tactics. In other words…there genuinely are no “vanity metrics”!
Lack of Control Over Conversion Points: Dan Rowe, CEO of Visit Panama City Beach, once said he refuses to use the phrase “heads in beds” because it’s not his organization’s job. He explained, “Our job is to build awareness and demand, upon which our local stakeholders can transact as they see fit.” No matter how effective our marketing is, we can’t control local hotels’ rates, price hikes at attractions, or governance issues that might derail a traveler’s decision to visit. While every company faces external challenges (like COVID-19), companies like Nike, Adobe, Apple, and American Airlines have more control over their conversion points than DMOs—a well-defined set of KBOs and a DDOM-style approach to managing them is crucial to address this challenge.
up next…
Although these challenges may seem daunting, they can be effectively addressed. In the final part of this series, we’ll discuss how a DDOM-style philosophy, Key Business Objectives, and the Play to Win strategic framework can help overcome these obstacles.
