It’s difficult to tell how a marketing campaign is going. Or is it? Block Island Tourism Council Director Jessica Willi has been experimenting with a servicethat tracks the council’s internet ads and then can determine if the person has subsequently visited the island or a shop or restaurant here.“It’s big-brother-watching-you technology,” said Willi, but works only if the person’s location tracking is enabled. In this spring’s advertising campaigns, there have been “70 conversions,” she said, meaning 70 people who saw an ad, then subsequently visited the island. “That’s a technology I was testing – just to see.”Tourism Council member Neal Murphy, who bought the Old Town Inn a couple of years ago said he asks all his guests how he heard about the island and most answered that they couldn’t remember ads, but learned about the island, especially recently, from the CBS Sunday Morning piece on the Glass Float Project, or from pieces on Mary Donnelly that have resurfaced since her death.The CBS piece seems to have brought many to the island for the first time. John Cullen said he had met people from Oklahoma and Virginia who saw it and said to themselves, “we have to go
