Visit Boise Tourism Division Drives Local Foot Traffic with Duft Watterson and Simpli.fi
Overview
Tourism Division Drives Travelers to Local Destination
Nearly 80% of U.S. adults said they are planning to travel domestically within the next 12 months (Statista, 2023). In addition, domestic travel spending reached more than 900 billion dollars last year, causing tourism advertisers to look for new ways to drive business to their local economies. Recently, the Visit Boise Tourism Division and their agency, Duft Watterson, partnered with Simpli.fi to reach their ideal target audience and maximize local tourism with a five-month programmatic advertising campaign.
While Duft Watterson has utilized Advantage, Simpli.fi’s agency management software since 2021, they have recently begun using Simpli.fi’s programmatic advertising solutions. The agency decided to implement Simpli.fi’s comprehensive programmatic offerings to precisely target several markets across the U.S., increase overall foot traffic to Boise, and accurately track conversions. Overall, the brand wanted to achieve a low Cost Per Visit (CPV) for in-person foot traffic to a variety of local establishments and increase visits to the tourism website.
Targeting Travel Enthusiasts at a Household Level
First, Visit Boise Tourism and Duft Watterson leveraged Simpli.fi’s Addressable Audience Curation tool to build a custom householdlevel audience that fit their target audience. By choosing from over 3,000 demographic variables, the advertiser selected the following criteria to identify over 3.5 million households:
- Interested in Arts, Culture, & Travel
- Interested in Entertainment, Wine, & Travel
The advertiser also supplied a list of two regions and 11 DMAs in order to focus on two targeting categories:
- Regional- places you can drive to Boise from
- The Northwest
- National- places you can take a non-stop flight to Boise from
- Atlanta, Austin, Houston, Denver, Dallas/Ft. Worth, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Minneapolis, San Diego, Palm Springs DMAs, and Northern CA (Sacramento/San Jose/San Francisco)
Simpli.fi’s Addressable Geo-Fencing solution then matched each individual address to the exact shape and size of the property based on GPS and plat line data, and automatically built a custom-shaped target fence around each.
Categorizing Conversion Zones
The Simpli.fi team then built over 1,100 Conversion Zones around a variety of local establishments within a 10-mile radius of Boise. Thanks to the Conversion Zones, the team could track the number of users who were delivered an ad and then visited each designated location. The Simpli.fi team also created categories in order to provide more granular insights into the types of businesses travelers were visiting most. The categories included: restaurants, hotels, retail, bars/pubs, museums, and the local airport.
Simpli.fi’s detailed reporting also attributed conversions down to the ZIP +4 level so the advertiser could determine where each visitor originated from. Due to the granularity of reporting, the team was able to see which targeted locations were driving the most visits and optimize the campaign accordingly to lower the CPV.
Blending Additional Targeting Tactics to Maximize Reach
Throughout the five-month campaign, Visit Boise Tourism used a combination of Simpli.fi’s proprietary targeting tactics as well as third-party audience segments to reach their ideal audiences. The advertiser deployed Simpli.fi’s Keyword Search Retargeting to reach users who indicated interest in travel or the state of Idaho based on their online searches. Simpli.fi implemented almost 2,700 keywords including Boise, vacations, Idaho places, and more to serve display ads to those actively searching for travel-related material online.
The advertiser also deployed Site Retargeting to serve the same ads to users who had already expressed interest in traveling to Boise by visiting their website.
Lastly, Visit Boise Tourism and Duft Watterson incorporated third-party audience segments to increase the campaign’s overall reach. The advertiser served the same display ads to users in relevant segments such as business travel, family vacations, domestic travel, leisure travel, and more.
Optimizations to Help Drive Performance
Throughout campaign, the Simpli.fi team monitored results and made mid-flight optimizations to improve overall performance. With the campaign broken out by regions and DMAs, the team could easily shift budgets accordingly to ensure areas driving the most visitors were also being served the most impressions. The advertiser shifted a portion of their ad spend to focus on users throughout the state of California, which ultimately drove an increase of both ad clicks and in-store foot traffic. In addition, the Simpli.fi team also made optimizations to both keywords and third-party segments to maximize overall campaign efficiencies.
Simpli.fi Increases Overall Foot Traffic
The five-month campaign drove a total of 4,196 visits to local establishments throughout Boise and generated 9,276 ad clicks. The Simpli.fi team created a dashboard for the Visit Boise Tourism and Duft Watterson teams to view the foot traffic results for each business category. In total, the campaign drove 2,305 restaurant visits, 854 hotel visits, 654 retail visits, 56 airport visits, 49 bar/pub visits, and 25 museum visits. Overall, the strategic targeting and midflight optimizations drove a low Cost Per Visit (CPV) of $10.53. Both Visit Boise Tourism Division and Duft Watterson plan to continue working with Simpli.fi to most effectively reach potential Boise vacationers.