Travel Michigan is the State of Michigan's official agency for the promotion of tourism. Housed within the Michigan Economic Development Corporation (MEDC), Travel Michigan collaborates with the state's Destination Marketing Organizations (Convention & Visitors' Bureaus, other regional marketing entities, and tourism-related state associations) to market Michigan and provide comprehensive visitor information services with the overall goal of promoting Michigan tourism. Travel Michigan's website serves as a portal for all Michigan-related tourist destinations. Fluency Media has performed pay-per-click advertising and search engine optimization for 3 years to help the state realize an increased performance of 550% over time. Additionally, Travel Michigan has received several accolades in the travel industry for its online accomplishments. Recently in 2005, Travel Michigan surpassed 1,000,000 monthly visits, aided heavily by pay-per-click and search engine optimization efforts.

Although regional Convention & Visitors' Bureaus and other independent tourism-related associations do gain visibility from Travel Michigan's website, many still need more online marketing in order to compete. Most associations, however, do not have the time to learn and employ online marketing for themselves and cannot afford online marketing firms. Michigan tourist destinations pull visitors from in-state as well as from surrounding states, who also engage in online marketing. Additionally, large travel wholesalers such as Expedia.com have massive online marketing budgets and often dominate the industry.

Travel Michigan decided to work with Fluency Media to offer Michigan tourist destinations a co-opt program for online marketing. Travel Michigan matches dollars contributed by the destination at a minimum contribution level. These funds are used to drive relevant pay-per-click search to the partner page(s) on Travel Michigan's website with a prominent link-off to the tourist destination's website. Fluency Media's proprietary tracking reports clicks by visitors to the partner site by key phrase, enabling Fluency Media to adjust bidding strategy to maximize clicks to partner sites. Monthly reports allow partners to monitor results.

The online marketing partnership program began in January of 2005 and has over 15 partners participating. Partners have seen anywhere from a 350% to 2900% increase in traffic to their websites. The program continues to attract more partners every quarter, many of whom have reported great success as a result of this affordable and effective program. Travel Michigan benefits from the program with an increase in its overall traffic, with partners contributing close to 10% of their traffic in some months. Additionally, Travel Michigan fulfills its goal of promoting Michigan tourism, while offering an effective program that allows local organizations to compete more effectively in the travel market in spite of not spending large amounts of advertising dollars.

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