One thing every single one of our clients share is a desire to grow.
Measurement shouldn't just help you keep score, it should help accelerate growth.
And most marketers' measurement approaches aren't measuring up.
This isn't just philosophical. How you measure changes what you earn: ineffective measurement costs businesses up to 35¢ in lost value per dollar invested in marketing, according to Analytic Partner ROI Genome. For many, that lost value is the difference between marketing that drives growth and campaigns that do not return their investment.
At Mythic, we've built an approach to measurement that helps capture the many flavors of growth, and more importantly, identify the opportunities to grow further. It's simple in concept and rigorous by design; both are crucial, because it makes it easier for us to repeat this framework across all our clients — even those in different industries who have different paths to growth.
Before we get to our approach, let's acknowledge the most common pitfalls brands face when building their measurement approaches.
Common pitfalls
Over-reliance on measuring tactics: focusing on indicators over outcomes
The most common measurement pitfall comes from mistaking measures and goals (e.g. Goodhart's Law).
All forms of marketing generate data — but it's not all meaningful. Just because we are able to count and compare the delivery rate of two email campaigns, the engagement rates across social channels, or the site visit rate after the exposure of digital media, does not inherently mean those measures can tell us if the marketing was successful in driving growth. They may, repeat may, indicate that one tactic was more efficient than another, but even that requires additional context to diagnose if other unrelated factors were contributing to the relative performance differences.
Leading global commercial analytic consultants like Analytic Partners, Kantar, and Ekimetrics, along with media platforms in Meta and Google have all categorically proven that marketing response data (clicks, CTR, even platform-tracked ROAS) is not correlated with sales, much less incremental sales.
This means we have two related problems here: focusing on performance actions that are not correlated with sales, and second, taking credit for influencing/associating marketing with sales that might have happened anyway (either appearing within a committed path, or even worse, accelerating a future purchase by discounting).
Does this mean that these measures aren't worth evaluating? Absolutely not. It just means that these measures should only be used for evaluating very granular tactical decisions — creative testing, design decisions and testing new formats within a channel against long-term tactics. More for tactical optimizations for efficiency, not evaluations of effectiveness.
Accepting different "truths": ineffective cross-channel measurement tools
Data is increasingly disconnected and disagreeing.
Two competing forces have twisted marketers in knots: the fragmentation of media and marketing platforms has increased the need for cross-platform measurement, and as these channels are most commonly digital, the use of Multi-Touch Attribution has exploded in the past two decades.
In parallel, using the cover of increasing sensitivity to consumer privacy, media platforms have locked-down access to the data necessary for these systems to properly function (cookie deprecation, blocking API data reads and non-integrated clean rooms). To compensate for preventing access to meaningful data, each platform now provides their own proprietary measurement — from attributable actions to incremental sales to channel ROAS. And since these measurement platforms are seeking to justify further investment in their own products, the incentive is to find any possible success; often taking credit for category shifts that are in no way a result of the brand's marketing.
The problem should be obvious — marketing tactics complement and reinforce one another, and these systems by definition do not talk with one another. Pair that with the fact that most businesses have a variety of non-digital conversions, means these systems are incomplete on multiple axes, and will clearly mislead marketers on which investments are working, and how tactics work together to drive incremental growth.
The net result — dramatic loss in true marketing ROI.
Taking full credit: only measuring direct effects
There are many kinds of growth marketing can influence. The most obvious are short-term, direct impacts: increasing sales and overall revenue, generating leads and expanding current customer value. But these outcomes, while important (and thankfully, easy to measure), are only a part of how marketing creates value for organizations.
Building sustainable growth requires properly accounting for all the impacts of your current investments — because that will shift where and how you need to invest in the future.
Only focusing on short-term, direct-impacts of marketing misses a few key things:
These are material financial advantages for the business that can be quantified, all created by effective marketing. Measurement frameworks need to account for these impacts so they can be planned for in overall marketing strategies.
Failing to focus: treating all metrics as equally insightful
Building a measurement framework that accounts for all these issues — capturing yet not being satisfied with tactical indicators, systemically addressing cross-channel performance barriers, accounting for a multitude of business outcomes, and tracking perceptual shifts — means that most marketers will end up with a measurement system that surfaces too many discrete data points. The potential for analysis paralysis, different parts of the marketing organization optimizing to disparate measures, or a "test and see" culture over confident decision-making is high.
Therefore, the last common pitfall of measurement approaches is not analyzing the measures themselves to identify which metrics matter and how they are interconnected. Which tactical KPIs are truly leading indicators of perceptual shifts; how can we predict longer-term change scaling up from an experiment within one region? Meta-analysis of the measures themselves will give you a hierarchy of effects, and allows teams to independently focus on optimizing against goals that align with the overall, long-term growth of the business.
We don’t have to accept these challenges as insurmountable, or only available to organizations with significant investments in marketing and a deep bench of internal analytics talent. With a repeatable framework for comprehensively capturing the right data, intentional partner selection for tech, data, and modeling, and a partner committed to using the insights to drive accountable growth over time, measurement can become an accelerator of growth for any organization.
See Part II for an overview of Mythic’s repeatable marketing measurement framework.
Ready to scale your brand with paid media and become an unstoppable force for growth? Reach out to newbiz@mythic.us to get started.
