Case Studies > Tourism > Discover Dahlonega

Discover Dahlonega Strikes Data Gold

RMG’s SmartPiXL and Bullseye platforms profiled 232,900 Gold Rush Days visitors across October. This unlocked the full story of who they are, where they originate, and how the destination can engage them year-round, ultimately uncovering a brand-new #1 out-of-state market.

Highlights

232,900 Visitors Profiled

In-person festival visitors captured across 31 days

4,234 Emails Captured

37% of unique website visitors matched to an email address

40K+ Peak Saturday

Single-day visits on the festival’s biggest Saturday

New #1 Market Found

Greenville-Spartanburg, SC emerged as the top out-of-state feeder DMA

Summary

Region

North Georgia

industry

Travel & Tourism

Company size

Small

rmg solutions

SmartPiXL
Bullseye Geoframing
Visitor Segmentation
Digital Ad Analytics

about

Discover Dahlonega (the Dahlonega-Lumpkin County Convention & Visitors Bureau) serves as the official destination marketing organization for Dahlonega and Lumpkin County, Georgia. Nestled in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains just an hour north of Atlanta, Dahlonega is celebrated as the site of the first major U.S. gold rush and the recognized heart of Georgia’s Wine Country.

Each October, the historic downtown public square hosts Gold Rush Days, one of the Southeast’s most anticipated and beloved autumn heritage festivals. To unlock the full economic power of this massive draw, Discover Dahlonega engaged RMG to move beyond a single-weekend perspective. By capturing the true identity of October’s visitor base—identifying who they are, where they originate, and what they seek—this engagement equips the CVB to convert seasonal festival traffic into a loyal, year-round audience that sustains local tourism and businesses throughout the entire calendar.

Challenge

Like many DMOs, Discover Dahlonega understood their festival was beloved — but lacked quantitative insight into who was actually attending, what drove them to visit, and which markets held the greatest growth potential. Without visitor-level data:

Marketing budgets were allocated based on intuition rather than data
Feeder market potential beyond metro Atlanta was largely unmeasured
Website visitors remained anonymous, with no ability to retarget or build audiences
Year-over-year attendance trends were directional at best

strategy

To transform anonymous festival-goers into a named, profiled, and highly actionable audience, the strategy relied on a unified digital-to-physical tracking model. By pairing real-time mobile location geofencing with passive web de-anonymization, RMG aimed to capture the full consumer lifecycle—bridging early-stage holiday planning on the web with physical footprint behaviors on the streets of Dahlonega.

solution

RMG’s approach was executed through two primary proprietary technologies operating over the holiday window:

SmartPiXL Website Visitor Intelligence:
RMG deployed SmartPiXL on the Discover Dahlonega website throughout October. The platform de-anonymized site traffic and matched visitors to RMG’s 150M+ household database, appending demographic, psychographic, and behavioral attributes to previously nameless web sessions.
Bullseye In-Person Geoframe Intelligence: RMG deployed Bullseye geoframes across Dahlonega throughout October to passively capture mobile device signals from in-person visitors. Device data was matched to RMG’s identity graph and enriched with demographic and lifestyle segmentation attributes.

results

RMG’s platforms successfully de-anonymized web and location data, revealing clear pathways to optimize future campaigns:

Database & Lead Acquisition: De-anonymized 11,480 unique web visitors, matching 65% of them to age, 66% to income, and 60% to marital status—capturing 4,234 verified email addresses (37% of unique website visitors) for ongoing marketing.
Visitor Footprints & YoY Dynamics: Tracked 232,900 unique physical visitors (664,112 total visits). While overall weekend traffic normalized by 11.8%, Saturday peak attendance grew 2.8% to 40,185 visits.
Feeder Market Shifts: Local in-state traffic was anchored by Dawsonville, Gainesville, and Cleveland. Out-of-state, Florida drove 28% of all digital research traffic, while Greenville-Spartanburg, SC, emerged as the new #1 physical feeder DMA, highlighting a highly profitable drive market.
Ad Channel Performance: Paid digital acquisition was heavily dominated by search, with Google CPC driving 89.5% of all paid visits—71.6% of which were captured specifically by lodging-focused campaigns.
High-Value Lifestyle Segments: In-person attendees highly indexed in premium, affluent lifestyle brackets (such as Power Elite and Booming with Confidence). On-site foot traffic peaked daily between 9:00 AM and 3:00 PM, indicating the prime window for local business engagement.

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