From Metrics to Meaning: Building a Smarter Marketing Measurement Plan

Marketing measurement is exploding – both in the constraints with additional privacy concerns and protections for consumers and in the freedom that AI brings in analysis, trending, and insight. A comprehensive measurement plan serves as the bridge between marketing activities and financial outcomes but where does one begin to make sense of all the data available to us?

Before Anything Else (Is BAE still a thing?): Clear Objectives

Align your marketing metrics with the overall business objectives. Are you trying to grow? Of course, but by how much? Do you have a customer retention goal? Do you know if your brand is strong across all your markets?

Target cost per lead is not your marketing goal. It’s a lagging indicator of marketing performance. Your marketing goal should be something like increase new customers by 10% while retaining 90% of existing customers. Setting that goal will lead to exploratory questions like,

• How many customers did I end the year with? What is 10% growth?
• Where did those customers come from?
• How much incremental opportunity exists within each of the acquisition channels?
• Do any channels have particularly high retention?
• Where am I losing the most customers?

Gathering this information will set clear objectives that everyone, including your CEO and your CFO, can get behind. You launch your marketing efforts and…then what?

Identify Leading Indicators 

Brand Engagement: social media engagement, website traffic, share of voice, share of market, brand searches, business reviews (like Google Business Profile), PR mentions

Customer Journey: time on site, new visitors, email open rates, touchpoint evaluation, soft events like content downloads or finding a nearby location, creative response rates

Conversion: app downloads, phone calls, coupon redemptions, form completions, booked appointments, online orders, incrementality

Market Assessment: market penetration, competitor share

Identify Lagging Indicators 

Sales: booked revenue, sales lift, average order value

Customer Retention: repeat purchase rates and value, customer lifetime value, net promotor score

Brand: brand lift, brand perception scores, CAC

As you can see, there are dozens of KPIs one could use to measure their marketing effectiveness. By understanding your objective, you can identify the metrics that make the most sense.

There are important measurement strategies that the best brands are investing in. They may not have it perfect, but in this instance, inches equals dollars. Incrementality testing and brand lift analysis represent a mature approach to measurement that goes beyond last-click attribution. For marketing executives, this multi-faceted measurement approach provides the data foundation necessary for strategic decision-making and budget justification.

Three Additional Pillars of Measurement Excellence

There are three measurement strategies that every CMO should invest in to illuminate the complexity of their customer’s journey and enable smarter, stronger marketing decisions.

Media Mix Modeling (MMM) answers the strategic question of budget allocation across channels and tactics. “If I invest $X in Y, I should expect to see Z.” You can get to this answer with a data dump and a spreadsheet of key marketing metrics across all channels like CTR, CPC, and conversion rate.

Attribution provides real-time optimization insights for tactical adjustments. Focus first on getting all your marketing data into one ecosystem and then run models to understand touchpoints across the “walled gardens.” Last click measurement simply won’t work in today’s marketing ecosystem.  If you are maxing out paid search but your costs to acquire a customer continue to rise, you have the wrong investment in-market.

Incrementality measures true impact and effectiveness for the business. Predictive models can help forecast future growth based on your current marketing signals. Leverage brand lift or search lift studies as starting points to understand lift in the market driven by awareness or consideration media execution. One of the easiest and most effective means of determining incremental lift is through experimental groups – segment into groups by geography, time periods, or simple A/B groups of users.

Strategic Implications for Marketing Leaders

Marketing leadership is being asked to do more than ever before. We’re there to fill the pipeline, keep customers engaged, close the deal, and then retain. To most effectively understand if your marketing is working, there are several critical strategic shifts that marketing executives must consider:

Integration Over Isolation: The most successful marketing approaches integrate brand building and performance marketing rather than treating them as separate functions. Performance marketing should amplify the brand, not operate independently from it.

Measurement Sophistication: The evolution toward comprehensive measurement frameworks requires marketing teams to move beyond simple attribution models to embrace incrementality testing, media mix modeling, and multi-touch attribution approaches.

AI-Powered Optimization: The integration of artificial intelligence into creative development, audience targeting, and campaign optimization represents a significant opportunity for the best marketing teams to get in front of customers like never before.