We’re getting more marketing reports than ever. So why is it still hard to know what’s working?

Most businesses don't have a shortage of marketing data.

They have Google reporting. Facebook and Instagram reporting. Website analytics. SEO reports. CRM data. Email reporting. Agency dashboards. Media reports.

Sometimes there are so many numbers that the obvious assumption is that the business must now know exactly what's working.

What actually caused our growth last quarter?

Or:

What should we spend more on next month?

And suddenly the answer becomes much less obvious.

Reporting what happened is only the beginning

A dashboard can be extremely useful for answering:

What happened?

Impressions increased. Traffic changed. Leads rose. Cost per acquisition fell. Revenue attributed to a campaign increased.

The next question is harder:

Why did it happen?

And the commercially important question is harder again:

What should we do differently because of it?

Those are different jobs.

A business doesn't necessarily need another dashboard. It may need help interpreting the evidence it already has.

Not everything can be known with the same confidence

Marketing measurement gets into trouble when every number is treated as equally certain.

Sometimes something is directly observable. Sometimes the evidence strongly indicates a conclusion. Sometimes it merely suggests one. And sometimes the right answer is:

We don't know.

That's not a failure of measurement.

Being clear about what the evidence cannot establish can be considerably more useful than creating false precision.

The amount of certainty worth pursuing also depends on the decision.

A business doesn't necessarily need an expensive measurement system to make a relatively small marketing decision. A multi-million-dollar investment decision may justify considerably more effort.

Measurement should help make the next decision

We don't think the primary purpose of marketing measurement is deciding which platform deserves the most credit.

It's helping the business decide what to do next.

Should we invest more? Should we change the mix? Should we stop something? Should we test something? Do we need more evidence before deciding?

That requires more than collecting numbers. It requires interpreting them in the context of the business problem.

More data doesn't necessarily create more certainty. Sometimes better measurement means being clearer about what the evidence can and cannot tell you.