Arrivalist, Digital Remedy Push Attribution Toward Real-World Spend
Digital Remedy and Arrivalist are connecting media exposure with GPS-verified visitation and consumer spending, giving travel marketers a clearer view of what happens after an ad is served.
Clicks, impressions, and website visits can tell marketers whether advertising generated digital activity, but they are considerably less useful for answering the question that matters to businesses dependent on physical locations: Did the campaign actually cause someone to show up and spend money?
A partnership between performance marketing company Digital Remedy and travel intelligence platform Arrivalist is attempting to close that gap for travel marketers by combining media activation with GPS-verified visitation and consumer spending intelligence. The companies are offering destination impact measurement alongside travel audiences built from observed travel behavior rather than inferred interests.
The immediate customers include destination marketing organizations (DMOs), hotels, resorts, and attractions, but the measurement problem extends well beyond tourism. Restaurant chains, retailers, entertainment companies, and other multi-location businesses face much the same challenge when trying to connect geographically targeted media investment with incremental store visits and revenue.
Moving Attribution Beyond the Click
The partnership combines Digital Remedy’s omnichannel media capabilities with Arrivalist’s VisitLift, SpendLift, and return-on-ad-spend measurement. Marketers can examine incremental visitation, visitor spending, origin markets, and the channels and campaigns associated with real-world travel behavior.
For Arrivalist CEO Ktimene Axetell, spending is the critical addition. “We’ve heard this resound from clients, prospects, agencies, and the greater industry: visitation lift is powerful, but marketers care most about ROAS,” Axetell told Street Fight. “They want dollar figures.”
That’s particularly important for DMOs, where Axetell said media can represent more than 70% of an organization’s budget and marketers must justify that spending to boards, hotels, local businesses, and other community stakeholders. The same logic applies to multi-location brands because foot traffic can demonstrate that consumers arrived at a restaurant, store, hotel, or attraction, but it doesn’t necessarily reveal the economic value of those visits. Connecting exposure to incremental visitation and then spending moves attribution closer to the business outcome marketers are ultimately trying to generate.
Accounting for People Who Would Have Come Anyway
One of the persistent problems with location attribution is separating campaign-driven visits from people who would have visited regardless of advertising. Arrivalist uses exposed and matched control groups to estimate incremental impact, which becomes especially important in travel, where seasonality, holidays, weather, events, and existing demand can all cause visitation to change independently of a campaign.
“Seasonality is exactly the kind of variable a matched control group is built to handle,” Axetell said. Natural arrivals can increase or decline for exposed and control populations simultaneously, she explained, allowing the remaining difference between the groups to provide a measure of campaign lift.
That principle has implications for any geographically distributed business. A restaurant experiencing increased summer traffic or a retailer benefiting from holiday demand shouldn’t necessarily credit those additional visits to advertising simply because customers were exposed to a campaign. Incrementality attempts to answer the harder and more useful question: how much activity happened because of the media investment?
Rethinking the Attribution Window
Travel creates another measurement complication with relevance beyond the category: consumers don’t necessarily convert on an advertiser’s timetable. A traveler can see an advertisement, research a destination, wait weeks before booking, and travel months later, making conventional attribution windows potentially incomplete measures of performance.
“Travel doesn’t work that way,” Axetell told Street Fight, describing Arrivalist’s measurement as longitudinal rather than ending with a fixed 30-day snapshot. “Consumers need time to make their trips, and we show those patterns over time to reflect real purchase behavior.”
The underlying lesson applies to other considered purchases and location-based experiences. Attribution methodology needs to reflect the actual customer journey rather than forcing every consumer decision into the same measurement window.
Arrivalist says that across its measurement clients it sees a 40% SpendLift over control groups associated with website visitation. That is a company-reported aggregate rather than an independently verified result, but Axetell sees an interesting implication as AI changes search behavior. Destination website traffic may be declining, yet consumers who do visit can still be influenced toward additional experiences and spending.
From Measuring Visitors to Building Audiences
The partnership isn’t limited to post-campaign measurement. Arrivalist is also making travel-behavior audiences available for activation through Digital Remedy. Rather than targeting people because a model predicts they might enjoy skiing, beaches, business travel, or other activities, the audiences can be built around observed visits to actual places.
That creates another potentially relevant application for multi-location brands: conquesting based on physical-world behavior. “Across private industry, where there is rich first-party data and more know-how, we see more conquesting moves,” Axetell said. Marketers may want to identify previous visitors to a particular place, category, or competitor and use those behavioral signals to build audiences for future campaigns.
Hotels and resorts could examine competitors’ visitors, while attractions could identify travelers already visiting complementary destinations. Restaurants, retailers, and other multi-location businesses can apply similar thinking around category visitation, competitive sets, and geographic markets.
Axetell said private-sector marketers are also interested in share of wallet, including how spending changes by season, origin market, category, and competitive set. That moves location intelligence beyond simply counting visits and toward understanding the economic behavior surrounding them.
Location Attribution Faces a Privacy Test
The growing sophistication of location intelligence creates a corresponding privacy challenge. Axetell said Arrivalist clients receive aggregated visitation information rather than device- or individual-level data and that upstream data is collected from users who have provided consent.
The company also adjusts its handling of geolocation information to comply with state-level restrictions on precise location data. That issue is becoming increasingly consequential as state privacy requirements around geolocation evolve, meaning the durability of a location-measurement strategy may depend not only on attribution methodology but also on whether its underlying data practices can withstand a tightening regulatory environment.
From Foot Traffic to Business Outcomes
Travel makes the attribution challenge particularly visible because the distance between ad exposure, website activity, physical visitation, and eventual spending can be substantial. But the underlying question is increasingly common across location-based businesses.
For MULO brands and their agencies, measuring a visit is becoming less of an endpoint and more of an intermediate metric. More useful measurement connects media exposure to incremental visitation, distinguishes customers who may have arrived because of advertising from those who would have come anyway, and ultimately establishes whether those visits produced enough spending to justify the investment.
That evolution brings location attribution closer to the metric marketers have wanted all along. That being ROAS grounded in what actually happened in the physical world.
