Driving Demand: What Visit Elkhart County Learned from RV Content Performance

Attribution connects marketing and website engagement to visitation patterns so destinations can understand what influences travel behavior, not just clicks.

The Challenge

Visit Elkhart County invested in RV storytelling and promotion, but lacked understanding of how efforts translated into real-world visitation. Plus, they sought intel to better take control of and optimize earned media performance, and supercharge future efforts.

Where We Came In 

Visit Elkhart County had RV messaging in the market through two routes:

  1. Earned media from a Discovery Channel feature on RV There Yet?, which generated valuable exposure, but was not inherently easy to connect to visitation outcomes. 
  2. Paid creative through a 30s commercial that ran during the Discovery Channel program, plus, a full-page RV industry magazine ad timed around a key local RV Dealer Open House in September.

Tourism Economics then did the digging. Using the Website Impact Calculator, we tied Visit Elkhart County’s website engagement to visitation patterns and analyzed performance across travel planning windows—focusing on August and September and excluding local DMAs to isolate non-local demand.

Key finding: RV-related content consistently ranked among the top drivers of visit rate across multiple windows of time:

  • 1–7 days: RV/Factory Tours 
  • 8–14 days: RV Hall of Fame Museum 
  • 15–30 days: Hotels/Camping–RV 
Pinpointing the Drivers

Once we confirmed RV content was consistently tied to higher visit rates, Tourism Economics worked backward from the visitation patterns to identify what was most likely fueling that RV interest. We uncovered who was responding (non-local audiences), when they were traveling (planning windows), and which RV pages were pulling them through.

The result: Visit Elkhart County gained clarity they didn’t have before, especially around the earned Discovery exposure, by seeing how RV messaging translated into measurable visitation behavior, not just attention.

Insights to Action

With evidence that the Discovery feature was worth leaning into, Visit Elkhart County built follow-through around the December re-air window by: 

"Tourism Economics helped us move beyond assumptions. When RV content began to show higher-than-normal visit rates, they provided the platform and the tools to trace that increased interest back to real traveler behavior and what content ultimately motivated them.” - Amanda Eckelbarger, CDME, Director of Strategic Initiatives

Access the full case study deck here.

Learn how our Website and Media Impact Calculators reveal the visitation, revenue, and community outcomes of your marketing initiatives. Reach out to Chuck Davison at cdavison@oxfordeconomics.com for more information and a full product demo.