A Winning Bet

Shift from outsourcing arrangement to in-house digital publishing cuts costs in half; improves downloads and click-through rates for visitors guides

The vibrant oceanfront community of Atlantic City, NJ attracts more than 30 million visitors annually who enjoy its world-class casinos, beaches, shopping, entertainment and golf.

The Atlantic City Convention & Visitors Authority serves as the destination’s principal marketing arm, stimulating economic growth through convention and leisure tourism development. The Authority hosts a comprehensive web site and publishes several guides to help meeting planners, tour operators and individuals plan their ideal event or vacation.

The Authority’s primary publication is the “The Official Atlantic City Visitors Guide,” containing everything a visitor might want to know about Atlantic City, including where to stay, what to do and what to see.

Zmags stands out for true self-service model, rich media and analytics

"When we outsourced creation of the guide,” Clark explains, “it typically took about one month for us to get a draft back, and the cost was nearly $10,000. It was one of our biggest expenditures each year. And other than the number of total downloads, we were unable to get any readership stats. Since we were already compiling all the content, and we were frustrated with cycle times that seemed to get longer each year, we decided to try creating and publishing the guide ourselves. We knew we could do a better job – and do it faster – if we took it in house.”

Clark and her team began searching for a self-service digital publishing solution. Their criteria included ease of use, solid analytics, and the ability to include rich media – particularly video – while maintaining fast download times.

Clark reports that Zmags was easy to use. “Within just a few hours, we felt pretty fluent with the Zmags tool,” she says. “Within a couple of days, we’d created our first Visitors Guide. When we used to outsource, it took a month and cost twice as much.”

Authority finds video doubles page views, increases click-throughs by 5-10x The Authority also now uses Zmags to publish its annual Golf Guide, which makes extensive use of video to give prospective visitors insight into each course. “We’re seeing that pages with video get about twice as many views, and 5-10 times more click-throughs, than pages without video,”Clark reports.

“Members love having the option.”

Clark notes that Zmags’ analytics features have provided detailed insight into readership that they’ve never had before. “In addition to macro statistics like total downloads, we can look at details such as the most-viewed pages, the most-viewed links, and even generate a heat map of where on each page people are zooming in most often,” says Clark. “That type of information is crucial for helping us understand what readers respond to best – like video – so we can improve content and get our members better results.”

Overall, in less than one year, the two publications the Authority has created using Zmags have earned:

• Over 16,000 visits
• Nearly 300,000 page views
• Over 35,000 click-throughs

As a result of their good experience with Zmags, Clark and her team plan to publish all four of the Authority’s guides using Zmags this season.

“When we got the proposals in, Zmags stood out for a number of reasons – first and foremost, it was the only solution that was truly self-service. All of the other vendors required us to submit files to them for final rendering, which to us defeated the purpose of having an in-house solution.”

April Clark, senior manager of emarketing, Atlantic City Convention & Visitors Authority