Why Measuring Marketing is So Challenging (and How to Make It Easier)
Let's get real for a minute. As marketers, we're drowning in data, yet we're thirstier than ever to actually measure our impact.
It frustrates me when I hear people say that marketers don’t want to get serious about results.
Because I love data. I’m a data-minded marketer.
But tracking ROI often feels like trying to pan for gold with a leaky bucket.
Marketers these days are being told to “prove our value.” Thanks to digital attribution tools, we’re expected to be able to do that with exact accuracy.
The one big question that keeps me up at night is….marketing isn’t a new field. I’m not the first marketer to exist. So….why does it feel like no one has figured out a unified theory of marketing yet?
Big marketing teams with huge budgets might not feel this pain. Or marketing teams that just need to track a single form that leads to a conversion might not. But for small to mid-sized teams, for long sales cycles, complex models, the struggle is real.
The problem isn’t just piecing together a oOMplEx cuSstomer joOUurney…
It’s tools that overpromise and underdeliver. It’s the office politics trapping data in silos. It’s the lack of data analyists on our teams.
We've got metrics, tools, and analytics platforms coming out of our ears. But A 2017 CMO survey showed 60.8% of CMOs aren’t fully utilizing their analytics.
Why aren't more marketing teams actually using all the data they collect?
I'll tell you why – there's a big huge gap between all the data hype and what companies are actually doing to support the gathering of the data they are asking for.
We need to start asking ourselves two critical questions:
What's actually important to measure? (And do we even know how to measure it?)
Are we investing the time, people, and resources to measure what we claim is important?
Is Everything in Marketing Measurable?
Some metrics are straightforward. At the bottom of the funnel, like sales and conversions. Someone clicks a link, buys something, and boom: tools like Google Analytics give you that clarity.
But as you move up the funnel, things get murky.
Like tracking website visitors. Imagine people walking by your store, or coming in, looking around, and leaving. You can’t always tell who they are or what they’re interested in. Some might peek through the window or avoid being seen. Privacy settings, cookie blockers, and lost referral UTMs cloud the picture.
At the top of the funnel, it's even harder.
While you might convert people from an ad, others might see your ad but convert later through another channel. How do you track that? Imagine putting up a billboard outside your store. Sure, you know people are seeing it, but did they come in because of that? Or did they see it, Google your name, and buy three months later online? Connecting the dots becomes a tangled mess of attribution and guesswork.
Brand Awareness—Is It Even Trackable?
Some say brand awareness can't be measured. That's not entirely true—it just requires different methods, often more abstract and expensive.
At the top of the funnel, it’s not about tracking direct actions. It’s about planting seeds.
You’re reaching a LOT more people, most of whom aren’t even in-market. These activities matter because they keep your brand growing. But the time delay and complexity make it hard to track their impact. This is where digital attribution really lets us down.
Low-cost approaches:
Start tracking branded organic searches.
Earned media: media coverage, an social mention, an unsolicited Yelp review or even a reshare of your blog post.
Add "How did you hear about us?" to forms. Sure, it’s not flawless, but it gives valuable insights when done properly. Chris Walker points out that this is a free way to get valuable insight that companies are not using right now, especially for things like impact of organic content.
Medium:
Consumer Surveys: Look into services like Attest that will allow you to run global research surveys for people outside of your database for insight on brand awareness. You can use it to track that before and after campaigns and see results change over time. I especially love that they support an ongoing method of research, rather than just doing it once every 5 years.
More Expensive:
Traditional market research: Focus groups, etc: With these you typically need help from an outside agency. You can find things out like, “What’s your intent to purchase in this time period?” or “Would you recommend us to a friend?” But these can require large enough sample size to be statistically relevant.
Keep in mind - this is not an exhaustive list. But as I keep learning myself, Ill keep adding to it.
The point is — brand awareness is measurable, but it’s not always feasible. If your organization is thinking that digital attribution tools are all they need -— they might not be willing to invest in the measuring methods, and it’ll be hard to get the answers they want.
The Data Tracking Problem
Here’s the thing: for many companies, half the battle is just making marketing measurable in the first place.
For instance, tools like Facebook will give you metrics like impressions and clicks for ads, but tying those to actual sales? That’s another beast.
Tracking doesn’t come out of a box. It requires set up.
You need code on your landing pages, perhaps integration with your CRM. Or if you use a third party landing page (in your automation software) it requires code on the THAT landing page and the ability to track that all the way to a thank you page to register that traffic as a conversion. That is the only way to see if your add was led to sale.
So many teams do not have this architecture set up.
Why not? Because of a lack of understanding of how tracking works. A complicated tech stack. Siloed management of different tools.
A 2022 survey by Deloitte found that 67% of marketers cite data silos and integration challenges as major obstacles to effective measurement.
Furthermore, for determining whether content was effective, you need to know if the leads that converted were qualified. This requires some architecture set up that reaches into the sales funnel to send data back in a feedback loop between your marketing team and sales team to understand how to adjust the content to better serve them next time.
If marketing doesn’t have visibility into how Salesforce or other CRMs are set up, that feedback loop breaks down entirely.
Final Thoughts: If These Numbers Are Important, Why Aren’t We Acting Like It?
If I can convince you of anything here it’s to…
Let your next hire in marketing be a marketing data analytics role. Or pay for your team to take a finance class and an analytics class. All data needs to be interrogated. It's not something you can just hand off to an intern and hope for the best. Effective analytics requires understanding the nuances of your tools, knowing which numbers matter, and being able to spot inconsistencies.
Don’t drive blind with attribution: Many teams don’t talk about what model they’re using. Is your tool defaulting to a last-click model? Is that undervaluing some of your efforts without you realizing?
Set up your funnel architecture: Make sure your tech stack doesn’t break your ability to track. Identify the gaps and fill them.
If data is so crucial to our companies (and our jobs), we need support, resources, and buy-in from across the organization.
And maybe, just maybe, we need to stop asking marketing to prove their value — especially when it takes a lot more than Google Analytics to make that happen.
