Visit Sacramento

+8.5M

Impressions

+23%

YOY Room Nights

6.9K

Clicks

Overview

Through strategic targeting, Visit Sacramento saw an increase in bookings and many highly targeted impressions throughout their campaign.

The Opportunity

Looking to reach and inspire leisure travelers, Visit Sacramento wanted to entice this audience to visit Sacramento and explore all the city has to offer, including farm-to-fork cuisine, festivals, and historical landmarks. Being the capital city of California, Sacramento experiences high volumes of business travel midweek but they were looking to bolster weekend leisure travel. Visit Sacramento’s objective was to raise brand awareness and engagement, and, in turn, increase bookings and revenue.

The Solution

In an effort to build awareness of the city of Sacramento with leisure travelers, Visit Sacramento partnered with Expedia Group Media Solutions to implement a highly targeted digital marketing campaign.

The advertising campaign featured display media on Expedia.com with multiple layers of targeting, all designed to fulfill the CVB’s goal of increasing awareness with leisure travelers and, in result, driving bookings in Sacramento.

Visit Sacramento consulted with Expedia Group Media Solutions and the Expedia hotel supply teams to identify targeting strategies when determining their top origin markets and identifying behavioral attributes that helped them define their desired audience.

Tapping into Media Solutions’ first party travel data, combined with third party behavioral targeting, they were able to reach two audience segments:

American consumers searching Bay Area and Sacramento destinations
Origin targeting, focusing on searches from specific cities including Seattle, Portland, Denver, Washington DC, Boston, New York, Reno, Fresno/Stockton, San Francisco/Oakland/San Jose, Los Angeles, and San Diego to Sacramento. They also layered in behavioral attributes such as: leisure, weekend, and family travelers, as well as young, free spirited travelers

In addition to strategic targeting, the Expedia Lodging Partner Services team secured discount promotions with Sacramento hotels to highlight on the custom, native Visit Sacramento destination landing page. The landing page not only featured hotel deals, but also included editorial and visual content highlighting upcoming arts/entertainment/music events and a long-form video showcasing some of the great things Sacramento has to offer.

The Results

The campaign was a success and allowed Visit Sacramento to garner more support from its hotel members to sign on for a full-year campaign. The majority of Expedia.com Sacramento hotel bookings consisted of leisure/weekend travel, as identified by peak travel-start on Friday or Saturday, and peak travel-end on Sunday. Delivering more than 8.5 million highly targeted impressions throughout the course of the campaign, Visit Sacramento’s landing page received 6,993 visits and room night booking demand was up 23% year-over-year.