Curating your Place of Impact (POI) list is the single most important step you can take to ensure you get strategic insights into visitor movement within your destination. Learn about the strategic lens we use when curating your POI list.
Consider a compilation of the most highly regarded films of all time. What if this list omitted iconic movies such as The Godfather or Wizard of Oz, or only included films categorized as action or suspense? Such a list would lack reliability, particularly if one needed to argue that Casablanca is among the greatest romance films in cinematic history, as it would not even be featured on the "top 100" list. It's clear how crucial a comprehensive list including all categories is in determining the rankings of the top 100 films.
The same is true with your primary Place of Impact list. In order to glean the clearest view of your visitor economy, you'll want to have a solid foundation of Primary POI to start from. POIs are places in your destination that we use to track and observe visitor movement in your destination. A person must engage with a designated POI to be observed as a visitor, and therefore, a complete list of strategically important places of impact in your destination is critical.
What are Primary Places of Impact?
Think of Primary Places of Impact as answering the answers of why and how. Why are visitors choosing your destination over another destination - your beaches, your shopping, your world-class entertainment, your vineyards, or casinos? And, how are visitors getting to your destination - by air, by train, car?
Primary Places of Impact are the places featured in your ads, on your homepage and in your itineraries. These are the places you will want to have greatest visibility in tracking because they are the marquee attractions to your destination and will be part of your planning strategies and key areas to watch from a visitor distribution perspective. Primary POIs should be thought of as physical and permanent places that receive visitation throughout the year.
What should I know about the Primary POI curation process?
You will receive a curated list of Places of Impact from your Implementation Specialist to review. When curating this list, we pay close attention to your Website and Visitor Guide, along with best practices learned from geographically-similar destinations we've worked with in the past. Our goal is to ensure your most strategically important visitor assets are captured. The draft Place of Impact list will look something like this.
What else should I know when thinking about Places of Impact?
- While you get unlimited Places of Impact, we suggest a maximum of 250 Primary POIs to ensure maximum utility of the ZDOS.
- You'll want to make sure your Places of Impact range across our standard categories from Accommodation to Arts & Entertainment to Transportation so that you can see trends in your destination by tourism type. You can learn more about the Zartico's standardized categories here.
- You'll want to make sure you haven't forgotten places of impact in less obvious categories like Medical, Business & Professional, and Commercial.
- You'll want to make sure your Primary Places of Impact are geographically dispersed throughout your destination.
- Make sure you include event venues where tentpole events are held. If it's a park that hosts a summer concert series or a church where a large flea market meets, include the location rather than the name of the event.
- As far as restaurants, we suggest choosing restaurants and bars that draw visitation to your destination. We like to say restaurants that food personalities like Guy Fieri or Bobby Flay would come visit.
- Remember, we supplement your Place of Impact list with our automatically-generated Contextual Place of Impact list to ensure a strong visitation signal. This list contains POI that help answer the question of what are visitors doing in my destination (i.e. going to chain restaurants, filling up their tanks at gas stations, stocking up at groceries at local grocery stores, etc.) You don't need to list these or do any work on this portion of your OS. Learn more about contextual POIs here.
- Our world-class geospatial information (GIS) team will work to geofence of the entire footprint of your Primary Places of Impact.
- When businesses fall under a single rooftop where we can't clearly differentiate interior walls, we recommend clustering businesses. Typically this applies in cases of Main Streets, downtowns, shopping malls, storied shopping centers, and vertically-built city environments.
These tips and tricks cover most scenarios for POI listing, but we know there are lots of questions that come up. See our articles on FAQs of POIs and Non-Standard POIs to learn more about some unique scenarios.
Need more help? Talk to a real human.