Marketing Measurement: The Never-Ending Quest

Does measuring your marketing programs’ value and ROI seem like the latest installment of a Mission Impossible movie? The latest marketing measurement study shows we have made little progress in overcoming this critical effort.*

With senior management pressure to quantify marketing’s return, it’s not surprising that refining marketing measurement and reporting is a growing priority for 84% of the study’s practitioners.

About two-thirds of the respondents said they needed to show marketing’s influence on the sales pipeline and revenue, plus demonstrate the ROI from the marketing investment. They also cited closed/won business, lead-to-opportunity conversion, and sales-qualified leads as their most important pipeline metrics.

But, those goals seem to be much easier said than done. The same group cited a lack of resources, messy data, and inconsistent sales win reporting as barriers to effective measurement. The result: about 60% of the study’s participants admitted they are struggling to measure and trace activity between sales funnel stages, and assess revenue impact across channels and campaigns.

Most B2B marketers are still relying on transactional metrics such as website traffic, email opens and click-throughs, and form completions/demo requests. And almost half of the respondents said they are still using Excel-based reporting in their measurement efforts.

The study summarized the results by saying, “Marketers are more interested in highlighting the impact of specific channels as opposed to collectively measuring success.”