How a Tourism Office Turned “Ghost” Visitors into High-Intent Travel Enquiries

With over 3 million annual UK visitors, the client faced a problem familiar to every national tourism organisation: their website is an inspiration and consideration platform, not a booking engine. Visitors arrive, explore destination guides and itinerary pages, then leave to book with airlines, hotels and tour operators directly.

The result was that 93% of those visitors were invisible. The client’s CRM captured only 6-8% of monthly UK traffic. Significant paid media budget was driving awareness, but with limited mechanisms to re-engage visitors who left before clicking through to a partner, most of that investment had no second chance to convert.

Cookie-based retargeting was also deteriorating. iOS privacy changes and growing ad-blocker adoption were eroding reach, and the client needed a GDPR-compliant alternative that could operate at scale in the UK market.

Optivo was deployed across the client’s full UK website and identified anonymous UK visitors in real time, matching them against esbconnect’s database of 17 million opted-in UK consumers and triggering personalised email sequences within minutes of a site visit.

Every visitor identified was net-new to the client’s CRM, with no overlap with their existing audience. Email sequences were structured around destination interest, with clear calls to action linking to the client’s accommodation, transport and experiences partner network.

A control group of identified but non-emailed visitors was established from the outset, enabling a clean like-for-like comparison of downstream behaviour.

Over the six-month engagement, Optivo:

• identified 29% of anonymous UK site visitors, growing the client’s UK CRM by over 22k net-new profiles
• delivered a 38.4% email open rate and 11.2% click-through rate
• drove a 41% uplift in partner site exit clicks from retargeted visitors versus the control group
• generated a 29% increase in return visits within 14 days among retargeted visitors, against the control group baseline

An audience previously written off as unrecoverable became a scalable, measurable channel for growing consideration and delivering higher-quality traffic to the client’s partner network.