Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
level of resources (Pike 2005). In most destinations, destination level marketing is undertaken by
the respective DMO, a public sector or semi-autonomous authority. The delivery of tourism
services, on the whole, is undertaken by the private sector. DMOs then, while competing in the
global market place, need to operate in a resource poor and highly politicised environment (Fyall
et al
. 2003). Some marketing objectives have short-term goals and are more tactical by nature
while other marketing objectives are more strategic, with expected benefi ts not being realized
for several years. The diffi culty then arises as to how to attribute the achievement of a KPI to an
individual campaign.
The tourist decision-making process further complicates the evaluation of the effective-
ness of destination marketing campaigns as there are many factors that can affect tourist decision
making as outlined by Sairakaya and Woodside (2005). Complicating factors include limita-
tions on destination choice sets (Um and Crompton 1990), the infl uence of other household
members and friends on travel decisions (Currie
et al
. 2008; Gitelson and Kerstetter 1994) and
the recognition that factors that infl uence destination choice can be interactive (Woodside and
King 2001).
The Internet has played a key role in the travel information perspective of tourism. Xiang
et al
. (2008) group this information search into three phases. Noting their potentially different
information needs, the pre-travel stage is where tourists seek information to be used for planning,
decision making and expectation formation; the consumption stage is where information is
sought establishing connections and relationships with tourism and travel service providers, to
aid short term decision making and conduct at-destination transactions; and the third post-
consumption stage is where information about the trips is generated, recorded and shared with
others. At all these stages, there is an opportunity to evaluate the effectiveness of different
elements of the marketing strategies. Given online information seekers will not typically examine
more than the fi rst three pages of search results, it is important for DMOs to have their web link
rank highly in the search engine. Hence, the ranking and position of the DMO website on
popular search engines can be a key measure of online marketing effectiveness (Xiang and
Fesenmaier 2005).
Review of evaluation methods
Various evaluation methods have been used to assess the effectiveness of tourism marketing
campaigns. These different evaluation techniques include conversion studies (Burke and Gitelson
1990; Woodside and Reid 1974; Pratt
et al
.; 2009), advertising tracking studies (Siegel and Ziff-
Levine 1990), experiments (Woodside and Sakai 2001) and quasi-experiments (Mok 1990), and
cross-sectional analysis (Silberman and Klock 1986). With the growth of Internet marketing and
social media, additional methods of evaluation have been created to assess the effectiveness of
the new media to achieve tourism marketing goals. The evaluation of websites has been
undertaken using fi ve approaches: counting, automated, numerical computation, user judgement
and combined methods (Law
et al
. 2010).
Advertising tracking studies generally seek to capture information relating to the intermediate
marketing objectives and KPIs. By collecting data on spontaneous and aided destination
awareness and destination advertising awareness, as well as destination preference and destination
image attributes, advertising tracking studies measure shifts in cognitive knowledge and attitudes
and travel intent toward a destination. Although it is important for marketers to understand what
works and what doesn't, this type of evaluation falls short of assessing whether tourists have
travelled to the destination as a result of being exposed to destination marketing. An evaluation
of South Australia's direct marketing campaign is described in Trembath (1999). The research
