Experience Scottsdale: Connecting Brand Marketing to Verifiable Impact

How Experience Scottsdale Connected Brand Marketing to Real Visitation Outcomes

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 needed to show not just 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.

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

This gave the team a clearer view of which campaigns, channels, and content were contributing to visitation, moving beyond broad engagement metrics to understand what actually drove outcomes. Scottsdale also used separate visitation data outside of attribution to identify a stronger opportunity in Portland, supporting its move from a secondary market to Tier 1.

The analysis revealed that 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. Importantly, only the first visit after exposure was counted, a conservative approach that helped avoid inflated credit. The goal was not to claim every visitor, but to understand which efforts actually moved the needle.

The Result

Scottsdale gained a clearer way to defend, improve, and explain brand marketing, showing stakeholders how specific campaigns, content themes, and markets contributed to visitation. The data proved effectiveness while also demonstrating 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.