Who is Media Impact Calculator built for?
MIC is built for large and small destinations both in the United States and globally. Most clients are DMOs but this tool is also built for agencies, publishers and other tourism-style organizations.
How does the Media Impact Calculator’s attribution methodology measure which people who saw our ads actually came to our destination?
MIC uses anonymized location data to connect media exposures to in-market visitation. It distinguishes between observed visits and influenced visits: the subset of those visitors whose visits were driven by your paid advertising. MIC measures only that second group as influenced, which means your figures reflect actual campaign-driven visitation rather than inflated credit from people who would have visited anyway. For a deeper understanding of the methodology, connect with our team.
What types of media and campaigns can MIC track?
MIC works with any programmatic media channel that allows third-party pixel placement. This covers display, video, audio, CTV, and most digital buys that run through programmatic platforms. Your dedicated solutions engineer will confirm compatibility for your specific media mix during onboarding. Tourism Economics is agnostic to the media that you run and does not run media of our own. We independently provide the data and intelligence to you, to inform strategy, decision-making and reporting.
Is the economic impact calculation based on a national or state average?
No. Every MIC client receives a custom economic model built specifically for their geography. Tourism Economics constructs individual models using destination-specific data inputs, including CoStar hotel average daily rates, QCEW leisure and hospitality wage data, and Longwoods International visitor spending trends calibrated to your market. Your economic impact numbers reflect your community’s actual lodging stock, regional visitor spending patterns, and local economic structure; not a national average applied to your region, and not an average spend per visitor applied across the board to every visitor to your market.
What does onboarding look like, and how long does it take to get my dashboard live?
Onboarding begins with a scoping process: defining your study geography, identifying key reporting needs, and configuring the custom economic model for your destination. Your dedicated Tourism Economics solutions engineer manages the setup and works with your team throughout. Timelines vary based on geography and media environment, but most clients have an initial dashboard view live within 6-8 weeks, with the Economic Impact modeling coming later after about 6 months once attribution windows are closed. MIC is not just self-serve platform and expert support is included throughout the engagement.
What breakouts do I get with MIC, and how detailed is the reporting?
MIC provides two core views: a granular analytics dashboard for your marketing and agency team, and an economic impact dashboard for advocacy and board-level reporting. The granular dashboard shows performance by media tactic, type, DMA, and vendor, so your team can see exactly which placements drove Influenced Visits and optimize accordingly. The economic impact dashboard shows visitor spending by category (lodging, food and beverage, retail, transportation, etc.), jobs supported (direct, indirect, and induced), local tax impact, return on investment, and wage and salary data.
MIC also integrates seamlessly with the Website Impact Calculator and Event Impact Calculator, so destinations can build a unified picture of marketing ROI across owned, paid, and event channels.
How is MIC’s economic impact measurement different from standard media performance metrics?
Standard media metrics like impressions, reach, click-through rate, cost per click tell you how your ads perform in-platform. They don’t tell you whether those exposures actually brought people to your destination. MIC closes that gap by connecting media exposures to confirmed influenced in-market visitation using anonymized location data, then modeling the full economic value of those visits through a custom economic model. You move from reporting ad performance to reporting influenced economic impact on your advertising campaign, the number that holds up in front of stakeholders and elected officials, not just marketing teams. This tool shows the economic ‘lift’ your destination would not have received without your advertising work.
How does MIC integrate with WIC and EIC?
MIC is part of Tourism Economics’ attribution suite that lives within our Symphony platform alongside the Website Impact Calculator (WIC). Destinations that use multiple tools can view their marketing ROI across all channels in one place to understand how website activity, paid media campaigns, and major events each contribute to visitation and economic impact. Because our products use the same custom economic model and the same underlying methodology, the outputs are directly comparable across channels.
Does MIC measure international visitation or work for international destinations?
Yes. MIC measures international visitation to your destination on media run in international countries, broken out by country. Tourism Economics also works with XX international destinations to measure economic impact of media.
