July 10, 2026
Updated July 20, 2026PR remains one of the most trusted forms of destination storytelling. But for Visit Grand Junction, trust alone was not enough. The team wanted to understand how earned media, owned content, organic social, and paid campaigns worked together: who they reached, where travelers came from, when exposure turned into a visi, and which channels and messages delivered the most value.
The challenge was to build a system where every touchpoint could be tracked, optimized, and defended.
Visit Grand Junction has already embraced a disciplined measurement approach. Links across eNewsletters, blogs, and social content that point back to VisitGrandJunction.com are tagged with UTMs, creating a clearer view of how audiences move from content to engagement.
For paid media, Visit Grand Junction also uses pixel-based tracking to capture campaign exposure, including CTV impressions, so a traveler can be connected to eventual visitation even if they never click through to the website.
Tourism Economics helped bring these data streams together through Symphony, centralizing GA4, UTMs, pixel-based campaign exposure, and visitation modeling in one decision-ready environment.
The Grand Junction team gained a more connected view of who is engaging, what resonates, which channels are effective, and what ultimately contributes to real visitation.
PR becomes more powerful when treated as measurable content, not a one-time placement. Visit Grand Junction repurposes earned media across social and its Press & Accolades blog pages, then uses tagged links to track how different paths perform.
Sometimes the team sends users to the DMO website, creating more on-site engagement. Other times, it links directly to the publication. The team can then compare which path is more likely to contribute to visitation.
They move beyond a simple earned-media hit, evaluating when PR content builds engagement and moves people toward visitation.
With GA4 and Symphony dashboards, Visit Grand Junction can monitor blog performance, PR engagement, and downstream visitation in one place.
Insights can be used to adjust future work. The team can decide where and how to feature PR on the website, and which campaigns or markets warrant more investment.
