The Crescent City-Del Norte County Chamber of Commerce and Visitors Bureau are not the only ones trying to attract tourists to the region.Count among the efforts Grammy-award winning artist John Mayer, as seen in a new online Land Rover ad that began running in the Atlantic Sept. 11.In the ad “John Mayer Goest Outside” (https://www.theatlantic.com/sponsored/land-rover-2020/john-mayer-goes-outside/3424/) Meyer took his Land Rover through Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park and along the Northern California coastline marveling at the great outdoors offered in Del Norte County.#placement_573654_0_i{width:100%;max-width:550px;margin:0 auto;}var rnd = window.rnd || Math.floor(Math.random()*10e6);var pid573654 = window.pid573654 || rnd;var plc573654 = window.plc573654 || 0;var abkw = window.abkw || '';var absrc = 'https://ads.empowerlocal.co/adserve/;ID=181918;size=0x0;setID=573654;type=js;sw='+screen.width+';sh='+screen.height+';spr='+window.devicePixelRatio+';kw='+abkw+';pid='+pid573654+';place='+(plc573654++)+';rnd='+rnd+';click=CLICK_MACRO_PLACEHOLDER';var _absrc = absrc.split("type=js"); absrc = _absrc[0] + 'type=js;referrer=' + encodeURIComponent(document.location.href) + _absrc[1];document.write('');“There’s a reason people call it escape,” Mayer says in the ad. “You’re slipping the bonds of something. Even if the bond is routine, you’re trying to come back with something you couldn’t have gotten any other way.”Lynette Braillard, founder of LuLish Design that is working with the chamber, unveiled the ad to the Crescent City Harbor District commissioners as part of her presentation on the effect the new Visit Del Norte County, California website (https://visitdelnortecounty.com) has had on local tourism.“We were not responsible for this, but this is amazing,” Braillard said. “His quotes are right on brand for Del Norte County. One of his best statements is him talking about our beaches and how we have an ‘unbranded profoundness.’”She added the Land Rover ad is an example of “earned media” placement that they didn’t know was in the works over at the Visitors Bureau.Braillard has tracked traffic to Visit Del Norte County website since it launched on April 1, 2019 — more than 35,000 visits, 60,000 page views and more than 500,000 organic search impressions.Braillard was excited about traffic to the website for the quarter of April 1 through June 30 this year alone despite the pandemic limiting travel throughout the state. She said the website has already received 60 percent of its overall visits for its entire first year. She added the website has generated about 444,000 organic search impressions just in the last three months.“What that means is this upcoming year, we are thinking that we will easily double, possibly quadruple, our website traffic and page views, and our organic search impressions,” Braillard said.“Right now, in this quarter, we’re up over 402 percent compared to the quarter in the previous year. We’re up 300 percent in page views,” she added. “Despite COVID and everything that has hit us this year, this is really great to see.”The trend continued on Visit Del Norte County, California’s social media outreach to Facebook and Instagram, which have generated 717,921 impressions and 25,773 people have liked, shared or commented on a post.Braillard said Visit Del Norte County “click-through rate,” or the ratio of users who click on a specific link to the number of total users who just view a page, email, or advertisement, is higher for Del Norte County at 3.28% than the travel industry average at .9%.“We’ve had 65 percent of our engagements already in three months as compared to the entire year previously,” Braillard said. “We plan to probably quadruple our engagements, impressions and link clicks for this upcoming year.”Braillard has also tracked the decrease in hotel bed tax over the final quarter of the 2020-21 fiscal, saying it was down 70 percent from the final quarter in the 2019-20 fiscal year.However, Braillard added that while demand for visitor lodging was down overall in California by about 41 percent, in rural areas, including Del Norte County, hotel room demand was only down 17 percent according to data from Visit California, released Aug. 12.“This kind of goes along with what we already know, that people are looking to flee the bigger cities,” Braillard explained. “This data is directly reflecting that.” googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('ad-1515727'); });