When you have marketing KPIs that don’t align with business outcomes, models that can’t explain why results happened, and insights that come too late to act on, you’re left scrambling to justify spend and prove the value of your efforts.
Marketing measurement makes your KPIs more meaningful.
In this guide, learn how to structure your marketing measurement framework, choose the right methods, avoid common mistakes, and build a system that supports faster media planning.
Key highlights:
- Marketing measurement quantifies the impact of your efforts on business goals, going beyond basic reporting.
- Traditional measurement faces challenges like biased platform metrics, siloed channels, and flawed attribution.
- A good marketing measurement framework provides cross-channel visibility and uses causal models.
- Best marketing measurement practices include using a cutting-edge tool like Keen, tying marketing metrics to objectives, and implementing a layered measurement system with regular testing.
What is marketing measurement?
Marketing measurement is the process of quantifying the impact of your marketing efforts against broader business objectives. It’s how you know whether a campaign actually worked, or just looked good in a dashboard.
Measurement in marketing goes beyond normal reporting:
- Reporting shows you what happened (impressions, clicks, conversions).
- Measurement connects those outcomes to business performance: revenue, pipeline, acquisition cost, retention, and more.
Read more: Guide to unified marketing measurement
Why is measurement in marketing important?
Measurement in marketing is what makes your campaign results quantifiable to the leadership. This is important because marketing instincts don’t cut it, especially when budgets are tight, channels are fragmented, and performance expectations are higher than ever.
With powerful marketing measurement tools, you:
- Provide visibility into performance drivers: Measurement helps pinpoint which tactics, channels, and messages contribute to real business outcomes, not just engagement. It takes ROAS vs iROAS into consideration, going beyond surface-level metrics.
- Create a better marketing channel mix: 53% of decisions are influenced by marketing analytics, according to Gartner. With accurate measurement tools, you can justify spend increases, cut wasted investment, and reallocate spend in real time.
- Account for full-funnel optimization: Campaigns rarely succeed in isolation. Marketing measurement helps you understand the interplay between awareness, engagement, and cross-channel media conversions.
- Fill the gap left by flawed marketing attribution models: Platform-reported metrics and last-click attribution miss the whole picture. Reliable measurement identifies what’s being over- or under-valued and corrects for bias.
- Uncover marketing incrementality: The key question isn’t whether a conversion happened; it’s whether marketing caused it. Implementing a marketing measurement strategy allows you to isolate incremental lift, which is the foundation of trustworthy ROI.
Read more: The power of marketing performance measurement
The challenges with traditional marketing measurement tools
If you’re stuck using outdated or incomplete marketing measurement tools, it’s costing you success. Here are the five biggest barriers holding you back:
1. In-platform marketing metrics are biased and self-serving
Ad platforms like Google and Meta report their own (inflated) results. They use attribution models that maximize their share of credit, even when they weren’t the true driver of the outcome.
These metrics are useful for optimization within the platform (if at all useful), but not for cross-channel optimization.
2. Marketing channels are measured in silos
TV, digital, social, influencer, and offline marketing campaigns are often managed and measured separately. This creates blind spots, especially when channels interact.
Even if you implement a unified marketing strategy but do not measure it, you’ll still be double-counting conversions, undervaluing upper-funnel channels, or over-investing in low-funnel tactics.
3. Marketing attribution misses the full customer journey
Most attribution models, especially last-click, fail to capture the real complexity of how your target audience engages with you. They give all the credit to the final touchpoint, which skews budget decisions and downplays the impact of brand awareness-building and retargeting efforts.
Read more: How to measure ROI on brand awareness
4. Traditional measurement metrics are not predictive
Traditional measurement tells you what happened after the fact. That might help explain past results, but it doesn’t help you plan ahead. You need a system equipped with predictive analytics in marketing that can forecast outcomes, not just diagnose them.
5. No clear view of marketing incrementality and causality
Just because someone converted after seeing an ad doesn’t mean the ad caused it. Without incrementality testing or causal modeling, you’re guessing at impact.
That leads to overestimating marketing ROI and underfunding the tactics that are truly moving the needle.
Read more: A guide to causality in marketing
What makes a good marketing measurement strategy?
A strong marketing measurement strategy helps you understand the right metrics for your business goals and supports both strategic planning and in-flight advertisement optimization. It includes:
- Goal-first thinking: Start by defining the outcome (example: incremental revenue, customer acquisition efficiency) and work backward to what needs to be measured.
- Cross-channel visibility: You need to include a cross-media measurement plan that includes digital and offline, performance and brand, paid and organic.
- Causal and predictive analytics: Your measurement should help isolate the real drivers of performance, not just report on what occurred.
- Always-on feedback loop: The best measurement isn’t a post-mortem. It’s a tool that updates continuously and helps adjust spend in real-time.
- Scenario-based planning: You should be able to simulate outcomes from different budget decisions, not just track past performance.
Key types of marketing measurement frameworks
There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to marketing measurement. Each method brings different strengths (and limitations). The best framework is to combine multiple techniques to get both directional insights and strategic clarity. The four key frameworks are:
1. Platform attribution
What it is: Conversion data reported directly by platforms like Google Ads, Meta Ads Manager, or TikTok Ads.
Strengths:
- Access to real-time data
- Easy to access and interpret
- Useful for channel-level optimizations
Limitations:
- Biased toward the platform’s own performance
- Doesn’t account for cross-channel marketing halo
- No insight into incrementality or causality
2. Multi-touch attribution (MTA)
What it is: Algorithmic models that assign fractional credit to multiple touchpoints across a customer journey.
Strengths:
- Better than last-click attribution
- Highlights complex buyer journeys
- Useful for digital-first campaigns
Limitations:
- Relies heavily on user-level data (impacted by iOS privacy changes and cookie deprecation)
- Struggles to include offline or non-click-based media
- Often overcomplicated without delivering clear action
3. Marketing mix modeling (MMM)
What it is: A statistical model that uses historical data to quantify the impact of media spend across all channels, including offline.
Strengths:
- Captures cross-channel effects
- Includes non-digital channels (TV, OOH, radio)
- Built on aggregated data, so privacy-safe
Limitations:
- Traditionally slow to build and update
- Requires large volumes of clean data
- May struggle to reflect rapid campaign changes
4. Hybrid measurement platforms
What it is: Platforms that combine MMM with machine learning, incrementality, scenario planning, and real-time optimization into a single interface.
Strengths:
- Unifies multiple models for a more complete view
- Includes both top-down and bottom-up analysis
- Designed for both strategic planning and day-to-day media decisioning
Limitations:
- Requires some upfront integration and model alignment
- Value depends on how well insights are operationalized by the team
Here’s how to select which one to choose:
| Marketing measurement framework | Use when |
| Platform attribution | You need quick feedback to optimize marketing spend within a single platform, but don’t use it to assess broader performance. |
| Multi-touch attribution (MTA) | You want to understand digital path-to-conversion dynamics, but it shouldn’t be your only model. |
| Marketing mix modeling (MMM) | You need a high-level, strategic view across all marketing spend, and want to align marketing with finance. |
| Hybrid platforms (for example, Keen) | You need to plan smarter, move faster, and prove performance across all channels. |
5 best practices for creating the perfect marketing measurement plan
Once your models are in place, measuring marketing automation success comes down to execution. Follow these operational best practices when creating your next marketing measurement plan.
1. Tie every marketing metric to a business objective
Before launching a campaign, ask: What business result are we trying to impact? Choose marketing performance metrics that reflect that outcome, like incremental revenue, click-through-rate (CTR), CAC, LTV, or pipeline contribution. Avoid surface-level metrics like website traffic, impressions, or engagement unless they directly connect to a larger goal.
Why it matters: If your metrics don’t align with how your company defines success, your results won’t get buy-in or a higher budget.
How to tie your metrics to business objectives:
- Add a “Business Objective” and “Decision KPI” field to your campaign briefs.
- Define what success looks like in advance (for example, “Increase qualified pipeline by 15% from paid media in Q3”).
Read more: 3 strategies CMOs can implement to showcase marketing performance to the CFO
2. Use a layered measurement approach
Don’t just look at one level of performance. Evaluate campaigns at four levels:
- Plan level: Are we hitting quarterly goals?
- Campaign level: Which initiatives are driving meaningful results?
- Channel level: How is each channel contributing?
- Tactic level: What messages, formats, or audiences perform best?
Why it matters: One dashboard can’t answer every question. Layered analysis helps you zoom in and out without losing context.
How to introduce a layered measurement technique:
- Structure reports by objective and granularity.
- Use roll-up dashboards for executives (plan/campaign) and deep dives for practitioners (channel/tactic).
3. Test your assumptions regularly
Run structured experiments to validate assumptions. That includes A/B testing creatives, geo-lift tests for incrementality, or holdouts to prove impact. Always design tests with clear hypotheses and success criteria.
Why it matters: Attribution models can’t answer causal questions on their own. Testing tells you what’s truly working and what’s not.
How to create a testing schedule:
- Build a quarterly test calendar.
- Use templates for test design that include: hypothesis, test/control setup, measurement method, and expected decision.
4. Combine data sources for a unified measurement view
Use a cross-media measurement tool to integrate data from all your platforms, ad channels, web analytics, CRM, and offline sales. This lets you see the macro behavior and understand how channels work together across the funnel.
Why it matters: Cross-channel effects are real and often underestimated. A unified view will help you understand the right allocation among channels.
How to integrate cross-channel marketing data:
- Use data warehousing tools like Snowflake to feed data into your business intelligence tool.
- Define common naming conventions and campaign IDs across platforms to make stitching easier.
- If you use Keen, the AI-powered MMM platform, you can leverage its in-built data warehousing feature.
5. Review your measurement system quarterly
If your business goals change quarterly or so, your metrics and models need to evolve to stay relevant. Schedule quarterly reviews to revisit what you’re measuring, how you’re measuring it, and whether the results are still actionable.
Why it matters: Markets shift. Consumer shopping behavior changes. Your measurement needs to keep up, or it’ll mislead you.
How to keep your measurement framework updated:
- Set up recurring QBRs with marketing, analytics, and finance.
- Include agenda items like model fit, key performance indicators drift, business alignment, and upcoming changes to incorporate.
Common mistakes to avoid when measuring marketing success
Getting marketing measurement right isn’t just about using advanced tools; it’s about avoiding traps that distort results, delay decisions, or drive the wrong actions. For example, you could be:
- Not tracking changes that affect marketing efficiency: Failing to log media shifts, creative swaps, or site updates, giving misleading insights.
- Assuming one test result applies everywhere: Rolling out a strategy based on a single geo or segment test without confirming it scales.
- Ignoring marketing mix modeling challenges: Treating outputs as truth without reviewing what’s driving the results, like attribution windows, seasonality, or data lag.
Build a successful measurement system with Keen
Your marketing team doesn’t need more dashboards. You need tools to measure marketing success accurately. That starts with a measurement system built for today’s complexity: cross-channel campaigns, fragmented journeys, and rising pressure to prove ROI fast.
Keen’s marketing measurement solution helps you cut through the noise:
- Get unified measurement across digital and offline channels
- Validate performance with real-time incrementality and modern MMM
- Forecast outcomes and optimize spend before performance drops
If you’re ready to leverage a reliable marketing measurement tool, get a free trial. Gain the clarity to move faster and the confidence to act.
