It's key for brands to invest in campaigns that are driving bottom-line performance. Here are 4 ways to evaluate your marketing campaign performance.

How To Evaluate Travel & Tourism Marketing Performance

4 Ways to Evaluate the Performance of Your Travel & Tourism Digital Marketing Campaigns

While the travel and tourism industry has enjoyed<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/danielreed/2019/03/08/booming-global-travel-tourism-is-driving-economies-and-job-growth-despite-u-s-china-trade-strains/?sh=7e48a9af2b85"> consistent growth over the past 10 years</a>, closed borders and government-mandated lockdowns during the pandemic have brought the industry to a screeching halt. It’s estimated that<a href="https://www.unwto.org/news/international-tourist-numbers-down-65-in-first-half-of-2020-unwto-reports"> international tourism is down 65%</a> in the first half of 2020 compared to the same time in 2019. This decrease in travelers has had a significant impact on travel and tourism brands’ revenue and profitability. Which, in turn, means that these same brands aren't able to spend as much on marketing as they did in previous years. 
Less budget means more pressure on brands to allocate their marketing dollars to the “right” campaigns – those that are driving proven bottom-line performance. Here are four different ways <a href="https://union.co/industries/travel-tourism">travel and tourism brands</a> can evaluate their digital marketing campaigns to inform those decisions.

As a creative and performance marketing agency, we’re <a href="https://union.co/services/data-brand-strategy/data-science-analytics">obsessed with using hard metrics</a> to evaluate the performance of our digital marketing campaigns. By hard metrics, we refer to the key performance indicators (KPIs) that directly correlate with sales and revenue.
After all, the most critical question a travel and tourism brand can ask when evaluating a digital marketing campaign is, “Did this campaign drive more revenue than it cost?” 
Here are a couple of travel and tourism industry hard metric examples: 
<ul><li>Bookings generated</li><li>Tickets sold</li><li>Reservations made</li><li>Revenue driven</li></ul>
Each of these metrics ties directly to a revenue-generating event. By evaluating your marketing campaigns based on the revenue they create, you can clearly understand how your campaign is impacting your brand’s bottom line.

Determine your return on investment by analyzing your hard metrics

While measuring the return on your campaign investment should be your primary method for campaign evaluation, soft metrics also have their place in determining your marketing initiatives’ success. 
Soft metrics can include any number of secondary campaign performance numbers. It all depends on the marketing channel. 
For travel and tourism brands, this could include:
<ul><li>Email open rates</li><li>Website bounce rates</li><li>Advertising impressions</li><li>Brand recall</li><li>Average length of an online engagement</li><li>Instagram audience size</li></ul>
While it’s hard to prove success with soft metrics (Are all of those 1,000 new Instagram followers purchasing tickets next week?), they can be used to help optimize specific aspects of your campaign and indirectly improve campaign performance. 
For example, if you’re using <a href="https://union.co/services/performance-media/marketing-automation">email marketing to secure online bookings</a>, conversion rate and booking value are hard metrics you can use to evaluate the ROI of your marketing efforts. However, you would still want to keep an eye on soft metrics like email open rates, unsubscribe rates and click-through-rates to inform how you can improve your email marketing campaign over time and create more opportunities to drive conversions. 
Use industry benchmarks to evaluate how your soft metric performance compares to your peers. If you’re below the industry average for a specific metric, it could be a sign that you have some room for improvement.

Leverage soft metrics to optimize campaign performance

Keep in mind, industry benchmark data doesn’t take into account the unique marketing aspects of your brand. 
For a more relevant apples-to-apples comparison, compare your current campaign performance to historical efforts. Has your conversation rate improved year-over-year? Are your advertising cost of sale ratios staying consistent? Did your engagement rate dip? 
Use your historical performance to identify where your campaign efforts have improved and where there still may be some trouble spots.

Compare year-over-year performance to determine growth and trendlines

There are parts of your marketing campaign that aren’t contributing to its success or your bottom line. But it can be challenging to suss out the aspects of your campaign responsible for driving the most ROI.
Start your waste identification efforts by first using your measurement and reporting frameworks to identify the specific channels that generate the most conversions. For example, <a href="https://www.phocuswright.com/Travel-Research/Research-Updates/2019/The-push-and-pull-of-travel-advertising">80% of travel marketers </a>consider search engine marketing (Google Ads) to be the most effective channel for delivering bookings.
Then, work backward and sideways to figure out relational channels that support that channel and assist in driving those conversions. While Google Ads may be a stronger channel for driving immediate action, brands rank Facebook (30%) and Instagram (28%) as the most effective channels for<a href="https://crowdriff.com/resources/blog/travel-statistics"> targeting new audiences</a>. 
Once you have a clear understanding of how your campaign is guiding individuals through their conversion journey, look at what channels or marketing messages aren’t part of that flow. Where are you investing in content or ad space that has a minimal impact on your audience’s buying decisions?

Determine which specific channels are driving campaign success

What critical business KPIs are you unable to currently track? Where are your gaps in attribution modeling? Don’t make campaign optimization and evaluation decisions with only half the data picture. If your team is still using single-channel last-click attribution to measure performance, it may be time to upgrade your measurement framework. 
Need help getting your reporting in place? Our team of experienced attribution engineers can help you define and <a href="https://union.co/services/data-brand-strategy/advanced-attribution">implement an advanced attribution model</a> to track the full bottom-line impact of your travel and tourism marketing initiatives.

Bonus tip: Identify your measurement gaps now so you can better evaluate future campaigns

Union is a creative &amp; performance marketing agency that creates omni-channel campaigns, unleashing creativity on a data-driven world, helping brands produce memorable, measurable and repeatable results. Obsessed with data-driven performance, we believe every marketing dollar should be viewed as an investment. Our clients expect a meaningful return and we prove the ROI of our work with quantifiable data.

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