Experience Scottsdale: Connecting Brand Marketing to Verifiable Impact

The Challenge

For Experience Scottsdale, brand marketing plays a critical role in differentiating the destination, shaping perception, and keeping Scottsdale top of mind. But as economic pressure and calls for accountability grow, destination leaders need to show not only what marketing reaches, but what it changes. Scottsdale needed a way to connect website engagement, media exposure, and campaign activity to visitation behavior, and to tell that story clearly to internal teams, stakeholders, and the broader community.

Where We Came In

To close that gap, Experience Scottsdale partnered with Tourism Economics on attribution, including the Website Impact Calculator and Media Impact Calculator, to better understand how marketing activity connects to real-world visitation behavior.

How It Helped

Using third-party methodology, the analysis compared visitation rates among exposed users against a control group, helping isolate the incremental visitation influenced by Scottsdale’s marketing activity.

Why It Matters

The result was a clearer view of which campaigns, channels, and content were contributing to visitation.

Key Finding

Attribution helped Experience Scottsdale move beyond broad engagement metrics to understand which channels, campaigns, and content showed a stronger connection to visitation. This gave the team a clearer way to evaluate campaign impact, compare performance, and explain the value of brand marketing to stakeholders.

Combining Data Backed Decisions

Scottsdale used separate visitation data, outside of attribution, to identify a stronger opportunity in Portland, supporting its move from a secondary market to Tier 1.

Visibility vs. Influence

Some high-traffic content played an important awareness role, while other pages and campaigns, sometimes lower in volume, were more closely tied to visitation behavior.

Avoiding Inflated Claims

Importantly, only the first visit after exposure was counted. This conservative approach helped avoid inflated credit. It was not about claiming every visitor; it was about understanding which efforts actually moved the needle.

The Result

Scottsdale gained a clearer way to defend, improve, and explain brand marketing. The team could show stakeholders how specific campaigns, content themes, and markets contributed to visitation.

The data proved effectiveness, but also showed good stewardship of taxpayer dollars.

Internally, the analysis gave the team a more practical basis for comparing platforms, evaluating content performance, and connecting marketing activity to measurable outcomes.

Insight to Action

The takeaway for other destinations: Brand measurement does not have to stop at awareness.

By connecting campaign activity, content engagement, media exposure, and visitation behavior, Experience Scottsdale gained a practical framework for understanding how brand marketing contributes to real outcomes.

Attribution gave the team a way to ask better questions:
Which channels are helping move travelers closer to visitation? Which content is doing more than generating traffic Which campaigns are showing measurable impact? And how can those insights help stakeholders better understand the value of destination marketing?