TL;DR:
In this third installment of the Measuring Marketing series, we explore key challenges practitioners and stakeholders face when applying data-driven findings. The challenges like uncontrollable factors and data quality can complicate decision-making. This article recommends steps to build a strong analytics culture that supports reliable and actionable outcomes.
Measurement plays a central role in modern marketing. It’s how teams justify spending, evaluate performance, and make strategic decisions. But as data becomes more abundant—and fragmented—measuring and leveraging insights have become increasingly complex. We identify a few considerations that can affect how stakeholders leverage insights and how teams can navigate through them.
Time Changes What Data Means
Measured insights are just a snapshot in time. As customer behavior and market conditions shift, past data—often tied to specific seasons or segments—may no longer apply to future decisions.
It’s also important to separate short-term from long-term effects. A campaign might drive quick wins, but its full value could show up much later in the form of brand awareness, loyalty, or repeat purchases. If you only measure short-term impact, you risk missing the bigger picture.
Not Everything Can Be Measured
Not everything that impacts measurements can be measured as is—and that makes things tricky. Bottom-up measurement approaches—like customer journey analysis or multi-touch attribution—are especially vulnerable to data quality issues. Privacy policies, disconnected platforms, and fragmented tracking often mean we’re only seeing part of the picture. Consequently, channels like paid search will get too much credit because they’re easier to track, even when customers would have converted without the ad or despite prior touchpoints.
What Should You Do?
There’s no perfect measurement—but there are ways to manage the gaps. These are some of the cultural alignments practitioners can build within their organizations,
- Build your organization’s analytics capabilities step-by-step and make sure practitioners and stakeholders stay aligned along the way.
- Align teams on what the data and insights do and do not show, and provide context to avoid overgeneralizing.
- Continuously test and evolve. Use well-designed tests to measure impact of actions.
- Incorporate different analytical approaches into your toolkit to offset the limitations of any single approach.
- Evolve your measurement strategy as your data, tools, and goals evolve.
Leveraging insights from the agile culture, organizations can grow their investment with confidence while reducing inefficiency and future risks.
Analytics Should Not Stop At Insights
Insights are only as valuable as the decisions they inform. Navigating measurement challenges takes more than just tools—it takes strategy, alignment, and experience. We help teams feel confident in their data, make smarter decisions, and cut through the noise. Let’s turn insights into action—together.In case you missed our past Measuring Marketing articles, check out how we think and approach building measurement capabilities and how we complement media measurement with incrementality.
