5 reasons DMOs need their data and advertising programs linked

Let’s skip right past the obvious – the time saved and the ease of use – and get into the nitty gritty of these five benefits to having your data and advertising programs linked.

• Full-Circle Advertising: Datafy’s full-circle advertising capabilities help close the loop between your marketing efforts and their verifiable ROAS. First, our extensive geolocation data sets are used to identify the audiences with the highest likelihood of converting on your visitation goals. Then, this target audience is exposed to your advertising and Datafy gets to work observing if and when those who were served the campaign’s creative arrived in-market. Detailed attribution reporting is provided at the end of the campaign to demonstrate the advertising’s real economic impact on the destination, but that’s not where the cycle ends – insights into what worked and what didn’t work goes right back into building strategy and audiences for the next one.

• Measuring Incrementality: We know how important it is to be able to prove incremental lift – but how can you have a clear understanding of the trips that were influenced by your marketing without having an undeniably comparable control group?  Datafy’s large sample size of data means that we can reserve a segment of devices that meet your targeting requirements as a control group in order to measure visitation without campaign exposure. By leveraging Datafy’s data capabilities to identify and track the group who visited in-market but were not exposed to the campaign’s advertising, and then comparing it to the rate of ad-exposed people that are visiting, we can identify incremental lift and provide a full picture of campaign effectiveness. This also allows a defensible, uninflated lift calculation based on a specific segment of visitors (for example, only focused on markets and demographics).

• Strong data fuels strong advertising: Access to back-end data enables Datafy to pull targeted custom, hyper-specific segment audiences with the highest likelihood of converting. The linking of data and advertising programs then allows for Datafy to seamlessly deliver the advertising campaign to this group, and track whether or not those within the target audience show up in-market. Then, Datafy dashboard’s live feed allows us to make changes to campaign strategy on-the-fly as needed. (For example: If we notice that the target group from one market isn’t booking room nights, should we shift the market focus or update the messaging?)

• A verifiable ROI: Datafy’s unique bundling of data and advertising enables our clients to report on raw data with a verifiable, defendable ROI attached to their marketing efforts. Rather than making assumptions based on digital behavior, Datafy reports on what people physically do. The results? Think along the lines of presenting a campaign recap that shows the minimum, physical number of hotel room nights booked as a result of your campaign, or a total number of day visitors that came from mobile devices exposed to your campaign. 

• Big players in other industries are already doing it: While the bundling of data and advertising is relatively new in the tourism industry, it’s already standard practice across-the-board in other industries. With the introduction of the Datafy tech stack, DMOs are now empowered to enjoy the efficiency and effectiveness of data-driven programmatic advertising that the rest of the ad tech world has already been harnessing for years. (Not to mention: doing so will allow DMOs to keep up with the cookie-free future, when new privacy laws will require organizations to find alternate ways to observe user behavior and generate and reach qualified audiences.)    

What about the data? It goes without saying that none of the above matters unless the data in question is high-quality, large in sample size, and collected and cleaned ethically and with integrity. You can rest assured that Datafy only works with the most robust, high-quality and privacy-compliant-data available - but it’s what we do with the data once we’ve received it that really sets us apart. All Datafy data is sourced, cleaned, stored, and modeled in house, ensuring that we have the cleanest, most normalized big data sets in the industry. Then, that data is optimized for the travel and tourism industry.

Our ability to layer multiple big data sources (like geolocation, spending, vehicle, lodging, and other owned data sets) into our platform is icing on the cake, because integrating additional data streams beyond your go-to geolocation data means that you can rely on results with more confidence.