How do you measure success?

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Good morning, Marketers, how do you measure marketing success?

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” Whoever first said that, in retrospect, had it easy. Ad dollars were being spent on billboards or radio and TV. Simple times. Today’s ever-expanding, multi-channel digital environment makes it much harder to attribute value to countless touchpoints with confidence.

There’s some agreement about that, but much disagreement on what it means. Some say traditional attribution modeling is essential if marketing is to be accountable. Whether a first-touch, last-touch or multi-touch model is used, measurement is possible; which, in turn, makes predicting future success possible. 

Others suggest abandoning predictive modeling in favor of an always-on approach that optimizes campaigns and moves dollars around in close to real-time. The question they emphasize is not “What worked last time?” but “What’s working now?” The debate isn’t going to be resolved any time soon.

P.S. A reminder: Register free for the upcoming MarTech virtual conference.

Kim Davis

Editorial Director

Shorts 

What we’re reading. “At its core, claiming that any deal was sourced by marketing depends on a set of arbitrary assumptions that don’t reflect the related impact of interactions with both marketing and sales across a buying cycle. It begins with the idea that there was a specific interaction — one shining moment — where an individual from a company interacted with a piece of marketing content that transformed their organization from an unknown into a viable prospect.” Why marketing sourcing is “a metric built to get a CMO fired.” Brett Kahnke, principal analyst, Forrester.

About The Author

Kim Davis is the Editorial Director of MarTech. Born in London, but a New Yorker for over two decades, Kim started covering enterprise software ten years ago. His experience encompasses SaaS for the enterprise, digital- ad data-driven urban planning, and applications of SaaS, digital technology, and data in the marketing space. He first wrote about marketing technology as editor of Haymarket’s The Hub, a dedicated marketing tech website, which subsequently became a channel on the established direct marketing brand DMN. Kim joined DMN proper in 2016, as a senior editor, becoming Executive Editor, then Editor-in-Chief a position he held until January 2020. Prior to working in tech journalism, Kim was Associate Editor at a New York Times hyper-local news site, The Local: East Village, and has previously worked as an editor of an academic publication, and as a music journalist. He has written hundreds of New York restaurant reviews for a personal blog, and has been an occasional guest contributor to Eater.