No Marketing Measurement Method is Perfect (And What You Can Do About It)

This is a partner guest article by Maggie Tharp, Product Marketing Manager At Rockerbox. Learn more about Rockerbox here .

If you’re looking for one marketing measurement methodology—a panacea to give you all of the answers to your questions of what’s working in your marketing—you’re looking for the wrong thing. It just doesn't exist. There is no one perfect marketing measurement approach, but that’s not such a bad thing.

As a measurement provider ourselves, it might seem strange to be touting the idea that all measurement methodologies are flawed, but accepting that reality is the first step to getting closer to the information you need to make the right budget decisions that’ll actually impact your bottom line.

Because while no marketing measurement method is perfect, marketing measurement is still vital to your success, and it’s more relevant than ever in today’s rocky macroeconomic climate.

How Multiple Measurement Methods Support You in a Poor Economy

When stakes are high and there’s extra pressure for every marketing tactic to tie back to revenue, marketing leaders can’t afford to skimp on marketing measurement that can help to prove the success of their efforts. Not only that, but they also need the right measurement methods to both optimize campaigns on a channel level and also make the right calls about which channels to spend into and how much to spend. Because each marketing measurement method has its pros and cons, it’s ideal to have multiple methods at your disposal.

MTA, MMM, Geo-Lift: All Measurement Methods Have Flaws

The marketing measurement landscape is full of different ways to assess the impact of your marketing—all answering the same essential question: Is my marketing spend paying off? Some providers tout incrementality testing as the best approach, others MMM, and still others take an attribution approach.

The truth is—none of these methods will answer all of the questions you have about your marketing performance, and all of them have their pros and cons. MMM, for example, excels at giving you high-level direction about the channels you need to invest in, whereas it’s not helpful for measuring organic impact or making campaign-level optimizations.

Take Rockerbox. We do a great job of helping customers understand the path to conversion looks like, including hard-to-track and offline channels. Even with that approach, there will still be conversions that come from a mystery source. In those cases, a great way to unlock more of the marketing puzzle is to implement post-purchase surveys—using zero-party data to complement the picture that Rockerbox is painting.

Diversification: The Secret to Better Marketing Insights

So if no measurement method is the end-all, be-all solution, what should brands do?

We like to think of all measurement methodologies as contributing to a clearer understanding of customer behavior and marketing effectiveness. When companies employ multiple methodologies for the situations that best suit them, they can build a more complete picture of what’s really working without being blinded by allegiance to one approach.

The whole goal of measurement and marketing overall is to continue to get better and find incremental ways to get more out of each dollar, understand the source of your traffic, and uncover what's actually driving ROI. With that, the goal can shift from removing all uncertainty about marketing attribution to how to minimize uncertainty as much as possible.

Rockerbox + Fairing: Filling the Marketing Measurement Gaps

Rockerbox uses first-party data to build a detailed picture of the customer journey, but when there are questions attribution can’t answer, that’s where post-purchase surveys come in. Rockerbox integrates directly with Fairing , meaning that data from their best-in-class surveys can be combined with the impact of your other marketing touchpoints to give you a complete picture of how your marketing is performing. Reach out to Rockerbox to learn more today.