Warren County Visitors Bureau officials are getting a better look at where visitors are coming from when they visit Warren County.

Information from Zartico, a company that uses geolocation, lodging and spending data to help determine where tourists are coming from, should help local officials know where to spend local marketing dollars so we get the most bang for our buck.

It’s interesting, for example, to know 41% of May visitors to Warren County came from Pittsburgh and State College, while only 4% each came from Erie, Charleston, W.V., and Buffalo. That’s good information to have when deciding where to spend local marketing budgets – or where to try to build new tourism pipelines. Having baseline information about visitors’ hometowns can help Warren County officials determine quickly if advertising dollars in a new market is effective. The ability to fairly quickly determine if our message is being heard should allow our limited marketing dollars to be used more wisely.

It’s also interesting to know that the average tourist spent $78 in a restaurant and $63 on retail last month. Overall, 17% of the money spent in the county in May came from visitors. Of that, 23% of money spent in local businesses came from visitors, 18% of local restaurant receipts came from visitors, 37% of retail spending came from visitors and 80% of accommodations receipts came from visitors to the area. Thirty-nine percent of visitors to Chapman State Park, the highlighted location in this week’s newsletter, were visitors from outside the area, with 53% coming from Erie, 12% from Buffalo and 10% from Pittsburgh.

Needless to say, there are wide swaths of the local economy that are dependent on bringing outside visitors into Warren County. That’s worth keeping in mind as local projects – like the riverfront development in downtown Warren – are discussed and built. Some projects will be used by local residents, but they could also be the type of amenity that lengthens visitors’ stays and causes them to leave some more of their money here in Warren County.

We can’t build an entire economy on tourism. But this new information from the WCVB tells us that tourism is an important – and hopefully growing – piece of our local business community.