Digital Marketing

January - February

Overview

During the January–February reporting period, Visit Greater Palm Springs continued to operate within a rapidly evolving digital environment shaped by AI-powered search, changing traveler behavior, privacy regulations, and reduced trackability across the web. In this context, traditional website metrics such as Users, Sessions, and on-site Conversions remain useful for internal monitoring, but they no longer tell the full story of destination visibility or influence.

For the first two months of 2026, the website generated approximately 388,180 Active Users and 512,374 Sessions while also driving more than 89,000 measurable actions including Partner Referrals, Visitor Guide Requests, E-Newsletter Sign-Ups, Coupon Referrals, and Digital Guide Interactions. These results indicate that users arriving on the site are continuing to engage with high-value trip-planning content and take meaningful actions aligned with travel intent.

The website also provided the following engagements during this period, which highlights the effective strategies implemented and engaged response from the VGPS audience:

• 86,188 Partner Referrals
• 2,249 Visitor Guide (VG) Requests/Downloads
• 1,795 E-Newsletter Sign-Ups
• 1,928 Coupon Referrals
• 42 Digital Guide Interactions

In addition, 9 new blogs were created and 25 blogs were updated.

A few of the new blogs to the site include:

• Things to Do in Greater Palm Springs
• Five Reasons to Plan Your Trip to the 2026 BNP Paribas Open
• Your Guide to the La Quinta Art Celebration (Spring 2026)
• Unforgettable Escapes in Greater Palm Springs: Art, Adventure & Relaxation
• Places to Stay in Greater Palm Springs
• Top Seafood Restaurants in Greater Palm Springs

Event-Related Content

Event-related content continued to perform well during January and February, particularly around seasonal trip planning and signature events. The Events section generated approximately 30,910 Sessions, reflecting a 2.85% year-over-year increase. This continued performance reinforces the importance of event-driven content as part of the travel-planning journey and highlights how users are seeking timely, specific information tied to near-term visitation.

Email Updates

For the months of January and February, the consumer and dineGPS newsletters exceeded the industry Average Open Rate (31.0%).

Newsletter Open Rate 

• January Consumer e-Newsletter 45.3% 
• January dineGPS e-Newsletter 44.3% 
• February Consumer e-Newsletter 44.4%
• February dineGPS e-Newsletter 43.7% 

Campaign Pages

Campaign landing pages continued to play an important role in supporting seasonal travel planning and targeted audience engagement during January and February. The "Escape Your Ordinary" brand campaign page remained especially well received, generating 34,769 Users and 32,506 Pageviews, indicating that the campaign continues to resonate with the intended audience and effectively reach travelers interested in the Greater Palm Springs experience.

The Spring Travel campaign attracted 2,285 Users and 4,744 Pageviews, helping support early-season trip inspiration, while the "Time to Fly" nonstop flights campaign brought in 2,902 Users and 3,615 Pageviews, reinforcing the value of highlighting air access and making it easier for travelers to plan a visit to Greater Palm Springs.

Industry Context

The January–February results should be viewed within the context of broader digital shifts affecting destination marketing organizations across the industry.

Travel planning continues to move beyond the destination website itself, with users increasingly discovering content through Google AI Overviews, social platforms, creator content, mobile-first search, and third-party travel tools. In many cases, travelers are getting answers before ever clicking through to a website, which reduces Pageviews and Sessions without necessarily reducing destination interest.

At the same time, expanded privacy regulations, consent-based tracking, and the ongoing loss of third-party cookies continue to limit the visibility of user-level behavior and reduce the volume of measurable sessions and conversions in analytics platforms. This means that declines or fluctuations in traditional traffic metrics do not always reflect reduced traveler demand, but rather the changing digital ecosystem in which planning and discovery now take place.

What This Means:

Traditional website metrics such as Users, Sessions, and on-site Conversions are still valuable for internal tracking, but they are no longer reliable as standalone indicators of success.

For Visit Greater Palm Springs, performance in 2026 is increasingly defined by the ability to:

• Support traveler inspiration and trip planning through useful, clear, high-quality content
• Remain visible across AI-generated search experiences and evolving discovery channels
• Drive intent-based actions such as partner referrals, visitor guide requests, and newsletter sign-ups
• Strengthen owned audiences and first-party data that can be activated through future campaigns

The January–February results show that while the digital landscape continues to shift, VGPS is still generating meaningful engagement from travelers who are actively planning visits and interacting with high-value content.

Looking Ahead

Visit Greater Palm Springs will continue refining its website strategy around a more qualitative, intent-based measurement framework. Rather than focusing only on traffic volume, success will increasingly be evaluated through discoverability, usefulness, clarity, engagement quality, and alignment with traveler intent.

Starting in April, VGPS will engage with Orange 142, a digital media agency, to execute a strong paid media and digital strategy within Google, Bing and YouTube. This will include driving qualified traffic to the VGPS site, supporting the broader destination marketing strategy and integrating AI-powered tools and automatic for campaign performance.

Over the coming months, the website team will continue to:

• Optimize high-value pages for AI visibility, search summaries, featured snippets, and traveler usability
• Support seasonal travel and signature events through timely content and campaign landing pages
• Grow first-party data through newsletter sign-ups, visitor guide requests, and other owned-channel actions
• Align website content with destination brand pillars and strategic priorities
• Monitor internal metrics such as users, sessions, conversion rates, search visibility, and engagement signals, while recognizing their evolving limitations in today’s digital environment