Those DMOs who missed out on NAJ’s DigMe Summit last week in Philadelphia—it is an outgrowth of NAJ’s long-running e-Tourism Summit, held each fall in San Francisco—also missed out on an opportunity to hear and see an explanation of a an easy-to-understand ROI model developed from the ground up by a DMO marketing official that has received warm reviews from those who know about it.
Matt Clement, marketing and partnership manager for the Fort Worth CVB prefaced his presentation on his ROI “Cocktail” by pointing to a large image of Jeff Foxworthy, better known as the host of “Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader”, and telling summit delegates that his objective in developing the bureau’s ROI model was to develop something “so easy that even this guy can get it.”
Those who work with Clement know him to be a “Measurement Sherpa,” described by The Measurement Advisor as “an in-house data wrangler and measurement resource who organizes queries, and gains insight from data.”
Clement told that publication that “DMOs used to rely on metrics such as web clicks and mentions to measure the success of campaigns. With new technologies such as tracking pixels, DMO’s can now track things like number of arrivals per 1000 impressions.”
“We can now say we had 3 million impressions in our target market or that we had one arrival per 4,000 exposures,” he added, explaining, “That’s pretty groundbreaking for destination marketers, which had to rely on vanity metrics before. It’s allowing us to replace those less meaningful metrics with KPI’s that have much more meaning to our shareholders.”
The trigger that set off the development of his ROI Cocktail were reports provided by data partners including Adara and Arrivalist showing above average bookings and physical arrivals by visitors exposed to Fort Worth’s owned media from origin markets in Califonia.
With its limited marketing budget more or less dictating that the bureau could promote to no more than two-to-three markets outside of primary its markets in Texas , Fort Worth began to target California and learn why its performance metrics indicated that traveler spend, length-of-stay and the price Californians paid for hotel rooms were higher than other long-range markets.
Creating an ROI Index: Determining Fort Worth’s Top Origin Markets 
—22.5 million = Total number of media impressions the Ft. Worth CVB tracked on the Arrivalist platform in 2015
—12.641 = Total number of arrivals the Ft. Worth CVB tracked on the Arrivalist platform in 2015
—1 = Average number of consumer arrivals in Ft. Worth market for 1,000impressions of FortWorth.com
Using the analytics platforms of Arrivalist and Adara, the bureau was able to pinpoint California travelers who had researched information on Fort Worth and indicated an interest in visiting as well as those who made a booking, what they paid for a room, how long they stayed and (on the basis of receipts) what their spend was (using data from the State of Texas soon to replaced by data from Buxton) .
The last piece of the puzzle that the bureau will soon solve soon with data partner Buxton, will be to analyze visitor spending across 7,500 retail segments. This data will help the bureau further narrow its targeting even more precisely—up to a zip code + 4 level.
Out of this developed Clement’s personal “ROI Cocktail”—a mix of metrics from each of his data partners—that has enabled him to illustrate to stakeholders and local governments the return on their investment in the CVB’s marketing activity.
Instructions for preparing the “Cocktail” follow.
For those who would like to learn more, contact Matt Clement: mattclement@fortworth.com
