Growth continues for Pahrump tourism online platforms

Pahrump continues to gain clout among tourists as its social media and website traffic grows steadily.

The Pahrump Tourism Advisory Committee presented data on website and social media performance from March through April at the meeting on Thursday.

While traffic to visitpahrump.com was flat in March, April saw a 69.3 percent increase in visits and 33.79 increase in page views compared to last year.

“This is good marketing, it is very good marketing, because at this stage of our website existence, the most increase we expect month-over-month or year-over-year, it’s 10 to 15 percent. That’s just the normal rate, so this is good marketing,” Arlette Ledbetter, tourism director for the town of Pahrump said.

By comparison, in March 2016, the website had better traffic and Ledbetter attributed it to last year’s super bloom in Death Valley National Park that quickly sparked a social media frenzy.

“We don’t know (that) for a fact, but we do know that the super bloom occurred for the first time in social media history. So it’s spread like wildfire on social media,” Ledbetter said.

Inside the numbers

U.S. visitors were the largest group that looked at visitpahrump.com with 70.9 percent, while visitors from Canada and India were second and third with 19.5 and 7.7 percent of all visits, respectively.

Nevada visitors top the list of all visitors to the website with 41.5 percent, followed by visitors from California with 23.3 percent and Texas with 3.7 percent.

Ledbetter also pointed out that while user engagement has been strong on Facebook and Instagram, Twitter has seen low engagement.

“Twitter is a really fickle platform for us. We are not adding a lot of success on Twitter, it’s just the way it is,” Ledbetter said.

According to the data presented at the meeting, Visit Pahrump’s Facebook had 98 new likes and 5,100 engagements year-to-date. Instagram had 104 new likes and 3,154 engagements and Twitter had 44 new likes and 333 engagements in the same time period.

“We are having good success on Instagram, we are enjoying a lot of engagement. The photographs tell a story, they speak to people, the photographs and videos,” Ledbetter said.

A closer look

Visitpahrump.com is a website that promotes tourism in Pahrump and is managed by BrainTrust.com, a Las Vegas-based marketing agency.

During March and April, the website had 73 earned media placements with a value of more than $505,000 and 129 million in impressions.

In addition, Ledbetter said a digital campaign titled “Native Advertising” has been running successfully.

“What we are finding is that this project is performing very well. We are gaining engagement, we are gaining very good impressions and click-throughs,” Ledbetter said.

The average click-through rate for the campaign was 0.46 percent, while average engagement score was 6.8 out of 10. Total impressions were 3,182,099 and total clicks were 14,605.

Contact reporter Daria Sokolova at dsokolova@pvtimes.com. On Twitter: @dariasokolova77