Goals: Clearly state your marketing goals. What did you strive to achieve using this piece or program?
Destination Canada, as the national marketing organization, is committed to influencing supply and building demand to benefit locals, communities, and visitors. By leveraging leading research, aligning with both public and private sectors, and marketing Canada both nationally and internationally, Destination Canada aims to showcase the country as a premier destination.
With the recent innovative digital transformation project, which includes the development of a decoupled architecture and design system, several key technical goals were set:
Cohesive brand application across all Destination Canada web platforms (including the 11 Traveler and two Business Events websites).
A branded component library to ensure consistency, ease of branding, and enhancements across platforms.
Simplified integration of external services and platform updates.
Improved security by limiting back-end access.
A user-friendly content authoring experience that is streamlined and consistent.
Consistent URL structures across all websites and languages, optimized for SEO.
Faster page speeds to improve the user experience.
Improved engagement metrics, including conversions and outbound links to partners.
Full accessibility compliance, ensuring an inclusive experience.
The front-end redesign focused on inspiring travelers to book trips and encouraging business event professionals to plan in any of Canada’s remarkable destinations. Larger, high-quality photos and videos were used to fully immerse users in the experience. Visually engaging and easy-to-use maps demonstrated the vast offerings of the country. Easily discoverable partner links, blog articles, and itineraries were incorporated to inspire users.
On the back-end, we developed a cohesive component library that is accessible across all Destination Canada brands. This, along with a consistent editing interface, allowed for easier and more efficient site management, ensuring a seamless experience for content creators.
Results: Which of your original goals did you achieve and how? How did you measure the effectiveness of the piece or campaign? Entrants should provide quantifiable results of their tactics or campaigns. (for example, click through rates or ad equivalency)
For this digital transformation project, our focus was to improve the technical infrastructure, branding application, and user experience of Destination Canada’s web platforms, while improving outbound links to Destination Canada partners.
We were successful in seeing the following metrics for all of Destination Canada’s Traveler sites combined from the launch of the decoupled project in July 2023 to August 2024:
5.1M Sessions and 628K Outbound Links (a 12.6% increase in Outbound Links compared to last year)
For Destination Canada’s current focus markets of the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, and Mexico, we saw the following success for the corresponding Traveler websites, in the same time period:
3.2M Sessions and 258K Outbound Links (a 9.3% increase in Outbound Links compared to last year)
2.4M Conversions Overall (a 183% increase in Conversions Overall compared to last year)
The Business Events platform similarly has a focus of promoting Business Events-specific partners to prospective event planners. The new platform drove the following success:
64K Sessions and 9K Outbound Links (a 46% increase in Outbound Links compared to last year)
We anticipate even greater returns as we continue into future phases of the project in late-2024 and 2025, which will include more Destination Canada brands introduced to the decoupled environment as well as AI functionality and technical enhancements.
Return on Investment: How much revenue has the piece or campaign generated and how does this compare to your goal? What was the return on investment?
In collaboration with its partners, Destination Canada focuses on promoting Canada around the country and the world. As such, our core success metrics are focused on the growth in outbound links to partners. We were successful in achieving improvements in Outbound Links for all of Destination Canada’s Traveler websites combined, from the launch of the decoupled project in July 2023 to August 2024:
5.1M Sessions and 628K Outbound Links (a 12.6% increase in Outbound Links compared to last year)
Similarly, we were successful in achieving improvements in the outbound links from the English and French Business Events platforms for prospective event planners. The new platform drove the following success:
64K Sessions and 9K Outbound Links (a 46% increase in Outbound Links compared to last year)
Destination Canada uses research to drive evidence-based marketing in nine key geographic leisure source markets: Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, Japan, Mexico, South Korea, United Kingdom and the United States. In addition, the Destination Canada Business Events team leverages in-depth global market analysis to target international clusters aligned with Canada's priority economic sectors. Prior to the launch of the decoupled environment, the Destination Canada team dealt with a complex and disparate content authoring experience, across a number of differently branded environments to support the above teams and markets. In this previous environment, it was difficult and time-consuming for team members to create and promote new content.
The new decoupled environment establishes a cohesive and on-brand environment for Destination Canada to quickly and easily create and promote content to market Canada as a premier four-season leisure and business tourism destination around the country and world.
Entry Title
Destination Canada: Digital Innovation through Decoupled Design