Attribution connects marketing and website engagement to visitation patterns so destinations can understand what influences travel behavior, not just clicks.
June 9, 2026
Updated July 13, 2026
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.
Visit Elkhart County had RV messaging in the market through two routes:
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:
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.
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.
Visit Elkhart County – WIC
