Unlocking Upper-Funnel Impact with Advanced Attribution
Visit Orlando
Smarter budget allocation, stronger audience strategies, and clearer insight into how awareness media drives meaningful engagement.
Read more about how we deliver Marketing solutions like this.
THE CHALLENGE
Visit Orlando was looking to increase their media efficiency and effectiveness. By partnering with ICON over the past 5 years, Visit Orlando has seen results across linear and digital. As part of the partnership, Visit Orlando has been particularly focused on improving attribution.
Visit Orlando relies on GA4 sessions and engaged sessions to measure campaign success. While effective for direct-response activity, GA4 lacks native view-through attribution, limiting visibility into the influence of upper-funnel display and video media.
With a meaningful share of investment focused on awareness-driving channels, Visit Orlando needed a way to capture engagement driven by ad exposure rather than direct clicks to accurately assess performance and optimize.
HOW ICON UNCOVERED VALUE
ICON implemented a custom cross-channel measurement framework using CM360 Floodlights deployed via Google Tag Manager, extending GA4’s session logic to enable view-through attribution.
ICON placed two invisible tracking tags on the website configured to closely mirror GA4 behavior. The first registers a "visit" when someone views at least one page within 30 minutes. The second registers an "engaged visit" when someone views two or more pages in that same window. This mimicked how Google Analytics already measures visits, so the data stayed consistent and reliable.
With this in place, Visit Orlando could track users who saw an ad but never clicked it, and still visited the site later. This is called view-through attribution — giving credit to ads that influenced someone, even without a direct click.
Using this data, Visit Orlando identified which specific ad placements were driving visits, used those insights to automatically improve how ad budgets were spent, and built audiences of people who had seen upper-funnel ads like video or display so they could be retargeted later.
The result was a smarter measurement system that connects ad exposure to real site behavior, giving them better data to spend their ad budget more effectively.
RESULTS
This solution transformed upper-funnel measurement from a blind spot into a data-driven optimization engine, empowering smarter budget allocation, stronger audience strategies, and clearer insight into how awareness media drives meaningful engagement.
Visit Orlando saw:
20% increase in attributed sessions and engaged sessions.
First-party and CRM-based audiences outperformed other segments.
26% increase in monthly GA4 sessions over the measurement period.