Marketing Effectiveness

Visit California’s global marketing program focuses on strategically directing the tourism industry's investment to uphold California’s position as the No. 1 travel destination in the nation.

Visit California’s fiscal year 2023-24 global media and website investment of $72.4 million generated $31.5 billion in incremental visitor spending, yielding additional revenue for all tourism industry business segments and all regions across the state. This is spending and tax revenue that would not have occurred without Visit California’s website and its paid advertising campaigns.

Visit California evaluates the effectiveness of its paid advertising and consumer website by calculating the resulting visitor spend among those who recall ads and/or came to the website. This spending is referred to as incremental travel spending — in other words, travel spending that would not have occurred without exposure to Visit California’s advertising or visiting its website.

Measuring incremental travel produces a conservative measure of impact. At a baseline, a percentage of travelers will visit a destination regardless of seeing an advertisement or visiting a destination website. To calculate Visit California's impact, only the spending from travelers above that baseline level is measured.

Visit California’s incremental impact data is sourced from research vendor SMARInsights, which has supported consistent methodology since the early 2000s.

To ensure that global media investment leads to increased visitor spending, paid marketing campaigns are regularly measured through creative testing, ongoing performance monitoring and the annual return on ad spend research to measure resulting visitor spend. Visit California continues to explore new ways of measuring success and tracking key performance indicators of global programs in the evolving marketing environment.