July 10, 2026
Updated July 30, 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, including who they reached, where travelers came from, when exposure turned into a visit, and which channels and messages delivered the most value. The goal was to build a system where every touchpoint could be tracked, optimized, and defended.
Visit Grand Junction had already embraced a disciplined measurement approach. Links across eNewsletters, blogs, and social content pointing back to VisitGrandJunction.com are tagged with UTMs, creating a clearer view of how audiences move from content to engagement. For paid media, the team also uses pixel-based tracking to capture campaign exposure, including CTV impressions, connecting a traveler 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. This gave the Grand Junction team a more connected view of who is engaging, what resonates, which channels are effective, and what ultimately contributes to real visitation.
A key finding emerged: PR becomes more powerful when treated as measurable content rather than 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, whether sending users to the DMO website to build on-site engagement or linking directly to the publication. This allows the team to move beyond a simple earned-media hit and evaluate when PR content actually builds engagement and moves people toward visitation.
With GA4 and Symphony dashboards, Visit Grand Junction can now monitor blog performance, PR engagement, and downstream visitation in one place, using these insights to decide where and how to feature PR on the website and which campaigns or markets warrant more investment.
