The Problem
DogTrekker.com had 9,681 dog-friendly California listings and a loyal audience of 29,000+ subscribers — but the platform underneath was falling apart.
- An aging Sage/Laravel theme with no active development
- Fifty plugins stacking up, each one a new point of failure
- Under-provisioned infrastructure crashing on OOM errors
- No first-party analytics
- No booking attribution
- No AI
DMO sponsors were paying for visibility but getting zero data on whether visitors actually booked. The site was a brand liability, not a business asset.
1. First-Party Booking Intelligence
The feature DMOs can’t get from Google.
We built a behavioral inference engine that detects when a visitor shifts from shopping hotels to browsing restaurants and activities in the same destination — the classic signal of a booking in motion. Seven weighted confidence signals, 15 data points per click.
2. AI Dog Chat
Shipped March 31, 2026.
A Claude Haiku-powered concierge on every page. Searches 11,000+ pieces of content. Surfaces a one-click “Book Direct” button that flows through to the booking-inference pipeline.
3. Site-Wide Interlink Network
Haiku generated 19,039 internal links across 9,138 listings in a single pass. Coverage went from 4.6% to 99.2%.
4. SEO Transformation
From zero custom schema to a competitive stack, engineered for Google Discover and AI Overviews alike.
- 8+ JSON-LD schema types deployed across listings, events, editorial, and hubs
- 94.2% of all content meeting Google Discover’s 1,200px image bar
- 35,549 junk redirects cleared from the redirect table
- 224 zombie redirect chains flattened to single hops
- 4 topic hub pages built to consolidate category authority
- 497 past events removed from the XML sitemap
5. Infrastructure Overhaul
We diagnosed the platform’s #1 stability issue — a phpredis TCP desync that triggered 4GB OOM crashes — and eliminated it with a four-layer isolation fix. Redis evictions went from 23,000 to zero.
| Resource | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| InnoDB buffer pool | 256MB | 2GB (8×) |
| Redis maxmemory | 1.5GB | 4GB |
| PHP-FPM workers | 8 | 35 (4.4×) |
| Active plugins | 50 | 41 |
| Must-use plugins | 0 | 62 |
| Custom plugins | 0 | 14 |
| Redis evictions | 23,000 | 0 |
Plugin counts reflect the shift from unmaintained third-party plugins to purpose-built mu-plugins and custom plugins owned by the engagement.
6. Privacy & Compliance
CCPA/CPRA-ready, shipped live.
- Global Privacy Control detection
- Google Consent Mode v2
- GAM non-personalized ads for opted-out users
/do-not-sell/page with full disclosure flow
7. First-Party Analytics Platform
Built from scratch alongside GA4 — not as a replacement, but as the layer that answers the questions GA4 can’t.
- Recency scoring on every identity profile
- Journey-phase narratives (exploring, shopping, booking, booked)
- Per-profile REST endpoints for downstream systems
- DMO sponsor email digests with a “Visitor Development” section
- Joinable to 755 days of GA4 BigQuery history via a shared identity key
8. Audience Reconciliation
Decades of audience data had accumulated across Mailchimp, WordPress, and legacy lists with no shared identity. We reconciled all of it.
The Numbers That Matter for DMOs
A DMO sponsor can now get a monthly digest that says:
That signal doesn’t exist in Google Analytics. It doesn’t exist in Meta’s tools. It doesn’t exist in the OTA dashboards. North & Vine built it.
Content Surface in Production
| Dog-friendly listings | 9,681 |
| Editorial posts | 1,490 |
| Cities indexed | 868 |
| Counties | 60 |
| Regions | 23 |
| Live events | 181 |
About North & Vine
North & Vine builds first-party data platforms, custom WordPress systems, and AI-powered experiences for destination marketers and travel brands. We rebuild what’s broken — without breaking the audience you’ve already earned.