Driving Real ROI

If there’s one question we hear time and time again in destination marketing, it’s this: “Can you prove our advertising is working?

Tracking success goes far beyond impressions or click-through rates. At Avenir Bold, we help our destination marketing clients measure what truly matters—like hotel bookings, in-market spending, and economic impact. That’s not just useful for reporting wins. It’s essential for making smarter marketing decisions in the future.

Take our long-standing partnership with Visit Raleigh. Together, we’ve built a data strategy that connects advertising spend to visitor actions and economic outcomes.

Here’s how it works:

• Through Spectrum Reach, we place streaming and linear TV buys and track results through their partnership with Adara, a leading source of OTA (online travel agency) booking data. The data we receive helps us tie advertising exposure directly to hotel bookings.
• On the digital side, we partner with Epsilon, which tracks in-market behaviors like dining and shopping through anonymized credit card data. This gives us deep insights into who’s visiting, where they’re spending, and how advertising plays a role in that decision.

Real Results, Real ROI

In FY24, Visit Raleigh’s campaigns drove:

• 53 million impressions
• 85,000 direct website visits
• $27 million in estimated economic impact from hotel bookings (Adara)
• 64:1 return on ad spend via Adara (for context, 8–10:1 is considered excellent)
• $23 million in in-market spending tracked by Epsilon
• 91,700 tracked visitors
• $242:1 return on ad spend via Epsilon

And we’re only getting started. In FY25, more than 75% of Visit Raleigh’s media spend will be measurable through these data partnerships—up from 50% in FY24.

With the right partners and platforms in place, destination marketing organizations (DMOs) don’t have to guess whether their campaigns are driving tourism. They can see it, down to the market of origin, planning window, daily spend, and more.