2025 is about finding your measurement fingerprint.

Bad measurement is easy to copy. Good measurement is unique to you.

You can measure many metrics. Important ones include ROI, incremental lift, new customers, customer retention, sales or tune-in, foot traffic, brand consideration, favorability, recall, and loyalty.  Proxy ones that aren’t as important include views, clicks, downloads, and likes.

You can measure many campaign attributes, such as channel performance, creative, messaging, website design, and targeting. They all contribute to the important metrics.

You can also measure a lot of complex stuff, like channel interaction, customer journey/lifecycle, optimal media mix, attribution, and incrementality. These help you determine how to structure campaigns and customer experiences.

There is not one best way to measure all of these different things, but there are better and worse ways to measure them. Don’t settle for proxy metrics; push your partners to prove their value, understand your customer behavior deeply, continuously improve, and figure out how to isolate what drove that improvement.  Make sure you have good-quality data, or your measurement will not be reliable.

There are many measurement pitfalls. A big one is focusing on measurable things without considering if they are driving your KPIs (like proxy metrics.) Another problem is sticking too closely to measurable channels that limit your growth. Affiliate, email, retail media networks, and websites might offer a tight, measurable loop, but you’ll need to spend further afield to drive new customer growth. 

You’re not alone in your measurement journey. Here’s what other executives have to say:

"We are working on making sure that, as silly as it sounds, measurement is truly in place, right? But not measurement for the sake of measurement. It's, what is the true goal of that creative, right? Is it a download? Is it somebody getting to the site? Is it for account-based marketing? I'm trying to make sure that these accounts are coming to the site, making sure that those goals are clear because we still get into this quicksand of like, oh, well we had this many visitors. Oh, well we had this many downloads. Oh, well we had this... Well, what was the creative supposed to do? It's a video. It doesn't say anything about downloads, so why are we measuring that?"

DIRECTOR, MARKETING
$10B-100B INSURANCE COMPANY

"Measurement is always a challenge. There's a lot of different areas to deploy your media buying budgets, and you always want to make sure that you have a very clear idea of how those investments are performing. When you don't have a very clear idea, or you can't trust the data, then your decisions on your investments become that much harder. I'd say that's the key big thing that we're facing right now."

MANAGER, MARKETING
$100M-500M LUXURY BEDDING RETAILER

"We have an MMM/MTA vendor that we are looking at… It's a newer thing for us because we are private equity owned, and so we place a lot of value on last-click attribution. So anything we do has to really be grounded in experiments and really understanding, just a very robust model that has some assurance that we're not lighting money on fire, right? Because it's easy to be like, oh yeah, I can go into Google right now into the GA and they'll be like, "Yes, these different touch points, accounts played a role in this conversion," but there's four other things that play a role in it. And it's like I can't just spend money based upon that. I need to have some concrete experiments hold up and stuff like that that can give us some confidence that it's legitimate."

VP, SALES
$10M-100M BOOK RETAILER

"We're going to go with Triple Whale. I think just overall from a cost perspective, they have a great attribution model. They really focused on bringing over the things that you did in Google Analytics into Triple Whale, which is super awesome. Also, they are a direct integration with Shopify, which we're still on, so we haven't had platform changes, which then it imports all of our tags and our tags are huge in how we organize a lot of our data. And so the fact that that direct integration is there, means we don't have to try to put things in there."

DIRECTOR, MARKETING
$10M-100M APPLIANCES RETAILER