National State Tourism Directors Mercury Awards > Travel Website

www.Arkansas.com

About This Entry:

For the relaunch of Arkansas.com, we had three main goals.

1) Inspire people to visit Arkansas – Research showed that people were not familiar with Arkansas. When looking at outdoor recreation and landscapes, images of Arkansas were associated with Colorado. Arts and culture photos were mistaken for Texas and music and entertainment were mistaken for Tennessee. While familiarity with Arkansas was low, interest in the product has to offer was high. For this reason, photography and videography were central to the website build, incorporating large, vast imagery, user-generated photo galleries, and photo essays.

2) Promote Arkansas businesses and events – The Arkansas tourism industry needed a new, reliable and transparent portal where businesses could log in and update their listings and events. During stakeholder interviews, industry partners indicated they did not know if their businesses were benefitting from Arkansas.com. Our goal was to create a tool where businesses and organizations could update their listings on Arkansas.com and see the traffic driven to their website, social channels, and other means of communication.

3) Reduce workload for Arkansas Tourism – The Arkansas Department of Parks and Tourism shares information between multiple sites. Before site launch, the sharing process was a manual one which resulted in outdated information. Our goal was to create an automated system that would send and receive information between multiple sites.

Campaign Strategy:

1) In order to inspire visitors to plan a trip to Arkansas, we focused primarily on video and photography, as well as targeting users through content personalization.

Leveraging user-generated content via Crowdriff has enabled us to tap into authentic user experiences in a lens that displays Arkansas in a new and unique light. With this tool, we feature photo and video galleries throughout the website to promote businesses and areas in the state within landing pages, photo essays, and seasonal updates.

Arkansas.com engages targeted users through content personalization via Bound 360. Through A/B tests, we are actively seeking ways to increase conversions and improve the user experience of the website. Additionally, we are able to hone in on targeted audiences and retargeting to capture engaged users.

“Discover Arkansas” is a new section of the website that reenvisioned a typical blog. The content is formatted to resemble a digital magazine layout that was updated with keyword-rich content on a monthly basis. Within Discover Arkansas, we include photo essays, videos, itineraries and articles to inspire readers with relevant and seasonal content.

2) One of our top goals was to promote Arkansas businesses and events on Arkansas.com. We pull in larger, more engaging photographs and increased the paths to discover partner profiles.

We employ a tool from Miles Partnership called the Extranet. Within the Extranet, industry partners can check referrals from Arkansas.com directly to their business or organization. They can view clicks to their website, social media channels, maps and direction, and contact information, such as email and phone numbers. The partner referral dashboard allows them to change the timeframe and compare against previous timeframes.

3) In order to reduce the workload for Arkansas Tourism staff, we developed a custom partner dashboard, the Extranet, to store, send, and receive information between multiple sites. If a user updates information in one place, that change will be automatically updated throughout the website and on other websites.

Results:

Following the site launch, we measured the overall success both quantitatively and with constructive feedback. For metrics, we’re analyzing August 1, 2018 – March 31, 2019, compared to the same timeframe of the previous year. Conversion rate is our top key performance metric and monitors signals of traffic, such as partner referrals, guides ordered, guides viewed, and newsletter signups. After the site launch, we generated:
• 72% increase in overall conversion rate, rising from 16% to 27.5%
• 46% increase in the number of guides requested, rising from 19,133 to 28,000
• 161,093 total partner referrals, including clicks to visit partner websites, social channels, directions, maps or contact via email or phone
• 73% engagement rate on Crowdriff galleries from more than 160,000 interactions and 217,000 views
• 97% increase in sitewide clickthrough rate on Arkansas.com through content personalization
• More than 86,000 pageviews on “Discover Arkansas,” with 38% of those being new entrances on the website, and a bounce rate under 50%

Additionally, the site was much easier to navigate for users, industry partners, and staff. On the previous site, the staff would often spend a significant amount of time making time-consuming changes that can now be updated quickly and easily. One staff member said: “it makes my day-to-day so much easier. [A specific task] would have been a two-day project for me in the old system, and I got it set up within 5 minutes. And that’s not a one-time thing; I see improvements to my workflow like this every day.”

Why This Is A Finalist: 

Arkansas demonstrated wonderful use of photography and typesetting—the user-generated content was especially smart and engaging. There was a clear increase in site performance metrics. Judges thought the video was high quality, and showcased various activities in Arkansas. Partners were very well defined and the methodology was clear. With a 72 percent increase in overall conversion, judges thought the redesigned site performed well.