Identifying marketing efforts so they can be measured for success is the goal of two specific technologically based programs of Visit Estes Park’s 2025 promotional programs, attendees at last week’s Tourism Summit learned.

The event, attended by 100 area retailers, hotel owners, short-term rental managers, restaurateurs, proprietors of tour guide companies, was held at the Estes Park Holiday Inn.

One of those programs, Placer.ai, shows that overall visits in 2024 were down but spending increased.

The Placer.ai location data tool used by Cindy Mackin, community engagement director of Visit Estes Park, provides information about how many people are visiting, what hours they’re visiting and measures the value of events.

According to Mackin, visitation during events from Thanksgiving weekend through Frozen Dead Guys Days increased.

“We are losing market share in that they (visitors) are not coming back as many times,” Mackin said during her presentation.

“You have the same amount of people, but they’re coming back less frequently, so we have to ask ourselves a lot of questions. Are the offerings in town what we want them to be? Are businesses staying open late? What do we need to see in terms of destination development, product development? Should there be different times of the year that we’re trying to market to and how do we make those visitors come back?” she said.

However, Mackin pointed out that in 2024 the Placer.ai data showed visitor spend was up 6.2% while visit nights were down 2.3%.

“It’s interesting to note that the last quarter, where we really put in a lot of marketing to extend the season, and we produced new offerings we were up significantly. In November, we were up 6.2% in overnight stays, and in December, we were up 12.5% in overnight stays,” she reported.

“A lot of that has to do with capacity. It has to do with rate. It has to do with a lot of things, but this is very telling in terms of what that seasonality looks like and where there’s a potential to grow and bring new visitors into town,” Mackin said.

Other statistics Mackin provided showed that 2.2 million guests visited an average of 2.48 times for a total of 5.4 million total visits during 2024 and 939,000 visitors came in July. During the year, people spent more than five hours in Estes during each visit and 61% of their trips occurred on weekdays.

VEP, the local marketing district, has long measured the effectiveness of individual business advertising on its website using traditional methods such as of volumes of impressions, click-throughs, and other metrics offered through programs such as Google Analytics.

During the meeting consultant Ellie Meinen described how her work at Attribution Solutions at Tourism Economics will measure advertising effectiveness in the coming year. Meinen’s work is a new addition to VEP’s data for studying its marking programs.

“We are comparing the visitation rate of people who saw an Estes Park ad or went to the website and measuring it compared to the visitation rate of people who did not see that ad or go to the website,” Meinen explained.

Meinen provided a detailed description of the process used in determining control groups used in analyzing the data to determine economic impact of the advertising or campaigns being studied as well as the result of impact the visitor spending creates.

Further use of the analytics will assist staff at VEP with their advertising strategies in assessing where the opportunities for better advertising opportunities are to continue to drive traffic year-round into specific seasons as they measure and compare year-over-year data.

Implementation of the new program with initial analyzation is anticipated to begin before the end of the month.

During the four-hour Tourism Summit attendees also provided feedback to Clarity of Place, the company preparing a tourism marketing plan for VEP, and heard highlights about activities undertaken by VEP during 2024.