Destination marketers often fixate on volume metrics—visits, spending, and conversions—to evaluate marketing effectiveness. But this approach tells only half the story because it ignores the costs required to generate these outcomes.
Combining cost with revenue metrics gives you the greatest control over your marketing efforts, allowing you to deploy the right tactics to accomplish your strategic objectives.
To illustrate this, here is an example:
So where should you allocate your marketing budget? The answer is, it depends on your strategy. Your strategic objectives will dictate whether you're looking to maximize demand generated from your campaign (efficiency) or grow your visitor economy with fewer visitors (quality of visit).
Are you:
It is important to highlight the need to pair cost-per-acquisition metrics with a measure of per-visitor spending to have a more complete picture of your marketing investment.
By identifying your high-efficiency markets—those that offer high quality and high revenue—you can make smarter decisions based on a comprehensive cost/benefit approach, rather than relying on one-dimensional volume metrics.
To find a high-efficiency market, focus on the most critical factor for destination marketers: proximity to your destination.
Zartico’s recent analysis of four Campaign Optimization campaigns revealed striking patterns:
🚙 Proximity markets (less than 3-hour drive): 2-3× higher conversion rates than mid-distance markets
✈️ Distant markets (8+ hour drive): 10× lower conversion rates, making visitor acquisition roughly 10× more expensive
This pattern isn't unique to our campaigns. We see the same trend in population-weighted visitation measures, hotel bookings, and website traffic. Independently, multiple academic studies confirm that visitation decreases at a predictable, stable rate as distance increases.
Byron Sharp explains this phenomenon brilliantly in "How Brands Grow" through two key concepts:
1. Physical AvailabilityFor consumer products, this means being available wherever purchases happen. For destinations, it's about travel accessibility:
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2. Mental AvailabilityWhen planning travel, what destinations come to mind?
When marketing to distant travelers, you're competing with global alternatives for mindshare. |
Naturally, it takes more impressions—and more budget—to influence someone far away versus someone nearby.
This isn't just theory. It directly impacts your budget allocation decisions:
Nearby visitors will cost less to convert than distant ones and are central to any efficiency-based marketing strategy.
If you're unsure of the right approach for your situation, know that this year, we at Zartico are shifting our recommendations from focusing on maximizing per-visitor revenue (quality visits) toward an efficient demand generation approach.
These strategic objectives will dictate whether you're looking to maximize demand generated from your campaign (efficiency) or grow your visitor economy with fewer visitors (quality of visit). Identifying your high-efficiency markets allows you to make smarter decisions based on a comprehensive cost/benefit approach rather than relying on one-dimensional volume metrics.