How DuPage, Illinois drove awareness and measurable visitors using Azira’s ad solutions

Situation

As part of its mission to promote DuPage County as an enticing destination, DuPage Convention & Visitors Bureau (DCVB) was looking to drive awareness for its DuPage Road Trip. The DuPage Road Trip was a months-long event spanning from May to October highlighting a blend of nature and art attractions across the county including The Morton Arboretum, Cantigny Park, Elmhurst Art Museum, and many of the restaurants, hiking trails, and more that the county offers. Just 20 miles from downtown Chicago, DuPage County offers a blend of urban sophistication and small-town charm. DuPage attracts more than four million hotel guests every year, accounting for a major source of revenue for local businesses like restaurants, museums, shops and more. Coming out of the Covid-19 pandemic, DCVB was eager to attract visitors and support businesses that are essential to DuPage’s economic development.

Challenge

The team at DCVB wanted to raise awareness of the DuPage Road Trip campaign with the goal of driving visitation and overnight stays. The team had experimented with digital ads and wanted to further understand the effectiveness beyond impressions and clicks. They saw that a majority of the visitors to DiscoverDuPage.com were on mobile devices, meaning it was also important to reach the potential audience on mobile. Additionally, the team wanted to be able to report on the actual impact of the campaign in terms of exposed visitors who actually made a visit to DuPage and its attractions, hotels and restaurants.

Solution

With the human movement data and targeting capabilities of Azira, the team at DCVB performed one of their first experiments in this type of advertising. The team identified different custom audiences based on visitors to art galleries, botanical gardens, and performing arts theaters in surrounding markets to forecast audiences that had a high affinity for the DuPage Road Trip activities. The campaign targeted 14 feeder markets.

Azira targeted custom audiences based on visitors to relevant places, including:

Art Galleries

Botanical Gardens

Performing Art Theaters

Throughout the months that the DuPage Road Trip was running, these audiences were targeted with ads driving them to a special event page on DiscoverDuPage.com for more information.

how-dupage-Illinois-drove-awareness-mobile-ad

In addition to tracking impressions and clicks, Azira was able to track actual visitation patterns after they were targeted, a level of monitoring and measurement not offered by the other digital advertising partners the team at DCVB had worked with. This provided quantifiable proof of ROI and impact that had been difficult to measure in past campaigns.

"We can’t just report on impressions and have that be enough. With Azira’s solutions we were able to see the actual impact and ROI of our campaign, down to the visits to specific points of interest. This level of transparency helps us not only prove the effectiveness of our ads, but also helps us optimize our efforts going forward."

Miriam Blumenthal

Director of Marketing and Bureau Partnerships, DuPage Convention & Visitors Bureau

Results

The team at the DCVB was eager to understand the campaign impact down to the visits to specific points of interest:

1.17 million impressions reaching forecast audiences in 14 markets

4.3K clicks to DiscoverDuPage.com overall, with interstitials ads reaching a 2.3% CTR, significantly higher than industry average

26K exposed visitors to the 124 points of interests tracked in DuPage, including hotels, shopping centers, attractions on the DuPage Road Trip and more.

4.7K exposed visitors to points of interest specifically on the DuPage Road Trip. More than 14K were seen at hotels, restaurants, shopping malls, attractions and other points of interest in DuPage.