Destination Advertising: Assessing Effectiveness with the Split-Run Technique

Abstract

State tourism divisions are increasingly being held accountable for generating tourism dollars. Recently, tourism analysts have called for the use of advertising tracking or split-run techniques to assess tourism advertising effectiveness. These techniques would allow for assessment of communication goals and could be used to infer causal relationships between advertising and its resulting effects. The purpose of this paper is to examine the use of the split-run assessment technique in state tourism advertising research and to present the findings of an empirical study using this technique to evaluate state advertising effectiveness.