Walk into any DMO marketing review meeting in 2026 and you’ll see the same five charts. Reach. Impressions. Engagement rate. Website sessions. Email open rate. Every one of them is up year-over-year. Every one of them gets a green checkmark. And every one of them is irrelevant to the person who decides whether your funding gets renewed.

The mayor doesn’t read your engagement rate. The county commissioner doesn’t care that your CTR beat the industry benchmark. The hotel general manager who chairs your board cares about heads in beds, length of stay, and average daily rate. The city manager cares about transient occupancy tax receipts. The state legislator cares about jobs created and sales tax generated.

None of those numbers are on the slide deck most DMOs are walking into board meetings with. That’s the problem.

Vanity Metrics Are Comfortable Because They Always Go Up

The reason DMOs lean into impressions and reach is simple: those numbers reliably trend up. Algorithms keep delivering, paid budgets keep buying inventory, and the dashboards keep producing favorable charts. It’s a closed loop where the marketer’s job is essentially impossible to fail at.

But trending up is not the same as creating impact. Sojern’s 2026 State of Destination Marketing Report, drawing on input from over 350 DMOs globally, found that the ability to measure economic impact has overtaken visitation and engagement as the top strategic priority for the field. Practitioners know the gap exists. The question is whether they’re willing to do the harder work of closing it.

What Funders Actually Want to See

Funders want a defensible line from your marketing budget to economic outcomes their constituents can feel. That means three things on every quarterly report:

One, an attributed visitor or visitor-spend number tied to specific campaigns — not modeled in a black box, but traceable to media spend with a documented methodology. Two, a comparison to a counterfactual: what would have happened without the DMO’s investment? Three, a tax-receipt or job-creation translation that converts marketing dollars into civic outcomes the elected official can cite at the next budget hearing.

If your dashboard can’t produce those three numbers, your dashboard is built for the wrong audience. U.S. Travel Association research has shown that destinations whose advocacy materials lead with economic-impact data outperform those leading with marketing metrics by a significant margin in funding stability.

The Hard Reframe

The reframe is uncomfortable because it requires DMOs to admit that most of the dashboards they’ve been building for the last decade were built for marketing peers, not funders. The peer audience is satisfied by impressions. The funder audience is not.

Pick one number this quarter. Replace one chart on the next board deck with an economic-impact figure. Build the methodology behind it. Be honest about what you can and can’t attribute. Then keep doing it until that figure — not engagement rate — is the headline metric your DMO is known for.

What Happens If You Don’t

If you keep walking into the budget meeting with reach numbers while the council is asking about tax receipts, you’re not actually answering the question. You’re answering a different question — and over time, councils stop asking yours. Funding gets reallocated. Mandates get narrowed. The DMO becomes a marketing department instead of an economic development partner. That’s already happening to dozens of organizations across the country. The DMOs that survive the next budget cycle are the ones that closed the metric gap before they were forced to.

Photo by Stephen Dawson on Unsplash