Most media measurement platforms promise “full-funnel” or “omnichannel” insights. But in reality, they either stitch together siloed reports, rely on biased platform data, or leave you hanging when it’s time to reallocate your media spend.
The result? You’re stuck making big budget decisions with incomplete or misleading performance information.
The solution is using a cross-media measurement tool that gives you more than a performance report.
Key highlights:
- A cross-media measurement tool is a platform that de-duplicates your audience impression, unifies data from different media channels, and finds the true attribution.
- To select the right media measurement tool, set clear priorities first. Your goals will determine the type of platform that best fits you.
- Choose a cross-platform measurement platform like Keen that offers incrementality measurement, continuous model refreshes, scenario planning, and explainable outputs.
- Avoid media measurement tools that just stitch platform reports together. Remember to ask hard questions about real-world implementation challenges before you make the purchase.
Follow these five steps to select the best tool for measuring your cross-channel marketing success.
1. Define the cross-media measurement tool accurately
Before you start evaluating tools, you need to be clear on what a cross-media measurement tool actually does.
A cross-platform measurement tool doesn’t just pull reports from Google, Facebook, Amazon, and TikTok into one dashboard. Instead, it creates a single, unified view of how all your media channels work together to drive business results, without double-counting, bias, or missing gaps.
A cross-media measurement tool helps to:
- De-duplicate audience impressions: One person seeing your ad on different social media platforms and CTV should count once, not twice.
- Normalize different data formats: You need to line up impressions, click-through rate, engagement, conversions, store visits, and brand lift studies across platforms that each track performance differently.
- Attribute value fairly across touchpoints: The steps of media planning involve finding the correct attribution. You need to understand how each channel assisted the customer journey, even if it didn’t close the sale directly.
- Capture full-funnel optimization impact. TV ads, CTV, digital video, search, social, display—all influence outcomes differently. Your measurement should capture both brand building and direct response.
Most basic marketing strategy software can show you what happened on each platform separately. However, not all can tell you how channels work together or what drove incremental results.
And that’s a major gap, especially when the average media plan spans dozens of platforms. According to Keen’s Marketing Insights report, in 2024, search still commands 26% of media spend, social and streaming combined now account for 35%, and 20% is still going to linear TV. Yet most brands still use disconnected, siloed reports to manage these investments.
If you don’t define the use up front, you’ll end up picking a “multi-platform reporting” tool instead of a true cross-media measurement solution. And that’s a very expensive mistake. They differ quite a lot in their operations:
| Comparison aspect | Multi-platform reporting tool | Cross-media measurement tool |
| Data view | Separated by channel | Unified measurement across all channels |
| Target audience count | Duplicated | De-duplicated |
| Media attribution | Last click or platform attribution | Incrementality measure |
| Business tie-in | Channel KPIs | Revenue, conversions, brand equity lift |
| Cross-channel optimization insights | Tactical insights | Strategic insights |
Read more: Cross-media measurement: What agencies must know
2. Set your media measurement priorities
Before you even start comparing features of the cross-media measurement platform, you need to be clear on what you’re actually trying to solve. Ask yourself:
- What decisions do we need better data for?
- What gaps in our current reporting are hurting us the most?
When you skip this step and chase “all the features,” you end up with a tool that looks powerful but doesn’t actually answer your real business questions.
Depending on your goals, your priorities will look different. Here are a few examples:
| If your goal is to… | Your measurement tool must… |
| Optimize ad spend in real time | Provide fast, in-flight advertising insights and elasticity estimates |
| Plan future budgets more strategically | Offer scenario-based, data-driven media planning and prospective forecasts |
| Prove marketing ROI and incremental lift | Focus on causality, not just correlation |
| Understand cross-channel customer journeys | Map assist paths across all touchpoints, not just last-click |
| Separate brand and performance marketing response | Capture both upper- and lower-funnel contributions accurately |
Pro tips:
- If your leadership team is focused on budget accountability, prioritize incrementality and forecasting capabilities.
- If you’re managing multi-brand or multi-region media campaigns, prioritize scalability and custom model tuning.
3. Evaluate the must-have features of different media measurement tools
Once you’re clear on your priorities, create a list of all the features the tool must have. Not every solution on the market will check all the boxes, and that’s exactly why this list matters.
The fragmentation problem is real. According to Nielsen’s Annual Marketing report, 62% of marketers globally use multiple, channel-specific tools just to piece together a view of cross-media performance. Only 34% use a single platform, and of those, many rely on in-house solutions that are costly to maintain.
If your tool doesn’t support your unified marketing strategy, you’re just adding another layer to the mess. Some non-negotiables that you should include in your selection checklist:
Cross-channel audience deduplication
Your tool must be able to identify and remove duplicate exposures across platforms. If a user sees your ad on a retail media network (RMN), Instagram, and Google, you should count one user, not three separate impressions.
Without deduplication, your reach is inflated and your results are unreliable. Worse, according to WFA, 80% of advertisers say poor frequency control causes audiences to “switch off” from advertising. If your measurement tool can’t manage this, it’s not just inefficient, it’s actively damaging your brand.
Take the AI-powered MMM platform, Keen, for example. It gives you a clean view of the user exposures across digital and offline channels.
Incrementality measurement
Marketing incrementality measure should be the highlight of every cross-channel measurement tool. It’s the incrementality measure that tells you what’s truly driving new outcomes, removing the in-platform-reported biased conversions.
Keen is an intelligent platform powered by Bayesian MMM, isolating incremental lift across channels. What’s more, you can see how the forecast actually performed.
Explainable and transparent measurement models
Your team and leadership need to trust the data-driven insights from the measurement platform. A black-box AI model that spits out numbers with no logic behind them won’t cut it.
If your team is on board, AI change management becomes a scalable process rather than a constant uphill battle.
Read more: Eight reasons to trust the Keen platform
Brand-specific model calibration
Generic media performance benchmarks aren’t enough for true comparison. Your tool must be able to tune its models based on your actual sales cycles, funnel stages, and customer behavior.
One-size-fits-all measurement leads to poor decisions because it doesn’t reflect your reality.
But what if you don’t have enough data?
Use a tool that has the science to back up its result. For example, Keen’s Marketing Elasticity Engine is powered by decades of academic and sales data. It can benchmark your reports against your specific industry average to evaluate your results holistically.
Platform-agnostic integrations
Your tool should pull from all your media and sales data, not just digital ad platforms. You need a source of truth for measuring your marketing automation success that’s platform-agnostic and business-outcome focused.
Keen, for example, offers integrations with CRM systems, offline sales data, web analytics, and digital ad platforms, making it a true cross-channel solution.
4. Know what questions to ask your cross-platform measurement vendor
When vendors walk you through demos, it’s easy to get distracted by fancy dashboards and buzzwords. We’re here to make sure that doesn’t happen. Ask the following questions to avoid problems after you onboard a platform:
- How fast can we recalibrate the model when we launch marketing campaigns on new channels?
- How do you handle emerging platforms that don’t have historical data?
- What happens if I don’t have clean, centralized data? Can the model handle missing or incomplete data?
- Will the tool help us map or clean data from disconnected sources?
- How do you handle offline data like store sales or call centers?
- Who on my team needs to run this, and do they need to be data scientists?
- How much ongoing support is included? Are we stuck in a self-serve model?
- Can my media team actually act on the output?
- How do I explain this model to my CFO or VP of Finance?
- Can I show how we got to the numbers and what assumptions were used?
- Do you provide guidance for turning model outputs into business cases?
- Can the model support scenario-based marketing planning?
- How long until I get insights I can use?
- Can your outputs plug into our existing dashboards, planning docs, or budget templates?
If you don’t ask these questions, you won’t find the dealbreakers until it’s too late.
Pro tip: Bring your finance lead or media lead into vendor evaluations. If they don’t trust or understand the methodology, the tool won’t get used, no matter how good the output looks.
5. Avoid common mistakes in choosing your media measurement platform
Even experienced marketers get this wrong. The cross-media measurement space is full of tools that look powerful, but break down when it’s time to operationalize. Some of the biggest mistakes to avoid are:
- Mistaking reporting for marketing measurement: Just because a tool shows data across channels doesn’t mean it’s measuring performance. Reporting tells you what happened. Measurement tells you why, and what to do next.
- Assuming “AI-powered” equals accuracy: Every tool says it uses AI. That doesn’t mean it’s using causal logic, measuring incrementality, or correcting platform bias. AI doesn’t fix bad assumptions; it amplifies them.
- Relying on platform-reported channel performance metrics as truth: If the tool depends on Google Ads or Meta’s attribution, you’re still stuck in their black boxes.
- Underestimating the time and resources needed: Some tools, such as open source MMM, require a dedicated analytics team to interpret the output. Others won’t work without perfect data. Don’t buy into “plug and play” promises without understanding what’s required to get value.
- Overprioritizing UI and dashboards: A beautiful interface doesn’t mean the model underneath is sound. Always look underneath.
- Ignoring how insights will be used in real decisions: You’re not buying a tool for show-and-tell. You’re buying a tool to drive smarter budget allocations, better forecasts, and more confident cross-channel planning. If the outputs aren’t usable by your decision-makers, it’s a dead end.
- Overlooking long-term impact in favor of short-term wins: Most tools only show short-term performance snapshots. But according to our marketing industry trend analysis, short-term ROI peaks by week 15, while full brand impact continues to build through week 90. If your tool can’t measure long-term value, you’re leaving growth on the table.
Read more: The top 7 challenges of an advertising agency
Measure your cross-media performance with Keen
Your cross-media measurement tool will shape how you plan budgets, justify spend, and prove your impact across the performance. The wrong tool locks you into platform bias, lagging insights, and reactive decisions.
On the other hand, the right measurement platform gives you the confidence to act fast, reallocate smart, and explain results in a way that leadership actually trusts.
That’s where Keen’s marketing measurement solution stands out. It gives you causal, brand-specific, and forward-looking measurement. With built-in incrementality, continuous model refreshes, scenario planning, and explainable outputs, you get a clear path from data to decision.
Start your free trial of the best cross-media measurement platform, built to show you where to shift your budget next.
