Austin boosts tourism with targeted mobile ad, interactive map

Brief:

Visit Austin, the marketing agency for the Texas capital, boosted tourism with a targeted mobile campaign that tracked its effect on urging people to visit from "drive and fly markets." The campaign delivered an 11% engagement rate and a 1.5% visitation rate as approximately 192,000 people visited Austin, according to a press release shared with Mobile Marketer.
The Visit Austin Leisure mobile campaign ran from May 11 to Sept. 30, 2017, with a digital banner ad that expanded into a full-page display that included a custom interactive map of local neighborhoods with pins indicating key destinations. Mobile users who tapped on the pins were shown a video of the area with additional information about sites and activities.
Most consumers who visited Austin after seeing the ad did so within two months, ad tech company AdTheorent found.

Insight:

Though Austin is a cultural focal point this week with the annual South by Southwest festival and conference, the city's Visit Austin Leisure campaign was effective at boosting tourism during last year's summer travel season. AdTheorent tracked the results of the mobile campaign as Austin saw a boost in visitors from "drive and fly" regions like Chicago, Houston, New Orleans, Oklahoma City and Denver for summer getaways.

The primary key performance indicator (KPI) for the campaign was visits to Austin resulting from engagement with the banner ad and its interactive mobile map. AdTheorent used predictive targeting capabilities to target only users within the target areas who were deemed most likely to engage with the ad and then visit Austin. The rich media engagement of 11% was 21% higher than the industry average, AdTheorent reported in the press release. Engagement was 8% higher in markets within driving distance of Austin at 11.1%.

To track ad effectiveness, AdTheorent developed a cross-environment map that connects 600 million devices among more than 90 million U.S. households to identify individuals by mobile phone, tablet, desktop computer and physical address. The map assigns a unique ID to each user so that AdTheorent can track ads served to multiple devices used by the same person.

Last year, AdTheorent helped the Michigan Office of Highway Safety Planning develop a similar targeted campaign focused on discouraging drunk driving instead of encouraging travel. The campaign featured a 360-degree immersive video that saw 88% completion rates, which was 40% higher than the industry average, the company said.