Since early 2024, Discover West Sacramento has made significant strides in its marketing efforts by focusing on elevating the destination’s visibility through key initiatives including defining the brand’s identity, increasing its online presence, and promoting the destination through paid advertising.
As Discover West Sacramento builds on this progress throughout the remainder of 2025 and beyond, this report showcases its momentum and achievements to date and how Discover West Sacramento can capitalize on them to more toward a successful future.
establishment of brand identity introduction
In the spring of 2024, Discover West Sacramento formally established its brand identity. Through this process West Sacramento determined how it would present itself to the public both visually and through messaging. The establishment of these features were key before embarking on the task of creating a new website and reaching larger audiences through paid advertising.
The completed brand identity now serves as a guide to ensure a cohesive look and messaging for Discover West Sacramento across all platforms and marketing materials. View the full Brand Guide here.
Discover West Sacramento embarked on a full website rebuild to create a refreshed look and improve the user experience for both mobile and desktop users, and most importantly shifting the website to WordPress for improved security and back-end maintenance. The rebuild also included simplified navigation, faster loading times, and additions including an event calendar and submission forms. The updated site was launched on May 21, 2024 and can be viewed here.
visit yolo marketing support website rebuild
Visit Yolo’s marketing efforts focus on increasing awareness and visitation of all Yolo County, including LDMs like West Sacramento. This includes organic efforts like placement on VisitYolo.com and Visit Yolo’s social media platforms in addition to paid placements via Google Ads, YouTube, social media, and more.
Major Visit Yolo initiatives featuring West Sacramento:
• Featured placement on billboard on I-5 highlighting the A’s presence in the destination for a period of 3 months
• Inclusion in 2024 digital display Brand Awareness Efforts (3,682 clicks)
• Inclusion in 2025 Meta & Google Farm to Table Campaign (29,570 clicks)
• Inclusion in 2025 digital display Farm to Table Campaign (2,124 clicks)
In 2025, Discover West Sacramento pursued a paid advertising campaign centered around the A’s first season playing in the city, at Sutter Health Field. This was the first paid effort of its kind with ads that ran on Meta platforms, Google Search, and YouTube, in addition to the billboard placement.
This effort required not only creative assets and video development, but building a unique landing page as well.
performance analytics paid marketing efforts
Website traffic has grown steadily since the completion of the website rebuild and began to soar in March 2025 after paid advertising for the A’s was launched. Although the campaign ended in mid-June, traffic to the site continues to remain higher than before paid efforts showing that the campaign helped raise brand awareness as people continue to re-visit the site and search for the destination using Google.
Key Performance Highlights
• Total Impressions: 9.3M
• Total Clicks: 5,303
• Paid ads drove 86% of all website traffic
Acquisition*
Organic Search
Direct
Engagement Rate*
*The above tables show metrics that exclude paid advertising to demonstrate the organic impact of website redesign.
Paid advertising centered around the A’s was a great way to get the rebuilt website in front of new users’ eyes and make a positive impression. The changes and improvements implemented with the rebuild also made the site a more appealing destination for users to return to.
visitation metrics
Utilizing tracking data collected through Datafy, our third-party intel and advertising partner, we can see an increase in visitation comparing 2023-2024 and 2024-2025. Some increase in visitation came organically due to the relocation of the A’s to Sutter Health Park, but based on the data, especially the original markets of visitors, a correlation can be made between visitation and paid marketing efforts.
Market
Los Angeles
SF/Oak/San Jose
Sac/Stock/Mod
San Diego
Seattle/Tacoma
Phoenix/ Prescott
(All above markets were targeted during 2025 paid advertising campaigns.)
The overarching goal of all marketing efforts of Discover West Sacramento is to increase hotel stays, and hotel stays increased 8.3% YoY from 2023-2024 and 2024-2025.
global travel trade & media exposure
To help elevate West Sacramento’s individual brand presence away from Sacramento on the international front, Visit Yolo welcomed and coordinated client visits to the destination to experience the unique “vibe” of Franquette and Drake’s: The Barn as part of a Yolo County experience. A group of German travel agents were hosted for lunch while a regional educational tour hosted representatives of Visit California, Visit Sacramento, and key motorcoach and group tour operators.
Other efforts have included the sponsorship of California Travel’s May board meeting with an in-destination presentation and baseball tickets to a game at Sutter Health Park and a visit from Visit Yolo’s PR agency, OffMadisonAvenue, brought their entire account crew to West Sacramento to be fully educated on the destination.
swag
Discover West Sacramento has created swag items to raise brand awareness, especially for those staying in hotels. The primary gift to overnight guests at the two assessment hotels were a white label for Yolo County wine (JDM Estates) which was customized to for Yolo County and specifically West Sacramento. Other gift items for guests included:
in-destination partnerships
West Sacramento voluntarily assessed hotels including the Hampton Inn & Suites and Home 2 Suites have actively participated in destination awareness efforts along with non-lodging businesses including Sutter Health Park, Drake’s: The Barn, Franquette, and Bike Dog Brewing.
