By Brenda Imeson, Director of Strategy, Brave Bison Performance
I have recently been exposed to the phrase and idea of ‘busywork’ – tasks conducted during work time but do not provide any tangible value to the company. For example attending meetings without an agenda or clear purpose.
Measurement should be the antithesis of this, we are all aware that we should be defining our KPIs and tracking our performance, but just because you measure something, it doesn’t mean it’s useful.
There’s a fundamental misalignment of focus at the heart of measurement. It’s not about data. It’s not about dashboards. They are just the ingredients and tools to help you make better decisions.
We measure to act. To know whether we need to pivot, double down, or rip up the entire strategy and start again. If your measurement strategy isn’t helping you do that, all you’re doing is hoarding numbers that act as a statistical comfort blanket.
Marketers, without an agreed goal you’re running blind
Imagine running a marathon. You train for months, you know the distance you need to cover, so that when the day comes, you’re keeping pace and hitting every milestone. Then you cross the finish line – and suddenly find out that actually, the race committee measured the distance wrong. It wasn’t 26.2 miles, it was 20.
That’s what bad measurement does. It makes you believe you’ve delivered success when, in reality, you’ve been running an entirely different race, and fell short in the end.
Marketers do something similar, launching campaigns, tracking numbers, forgetting to check whether they’re actually reaching the goal they planned for.
At its most core, measurement should answer one question: Have you delivered what you said you would? If not, what needs to change? And what does that mean for the next step?
Netball, marketing and the art of course correction
I used to play netball. It’s a strange game for the uninitiated; like football or basketball, each player has a position, but unlike those sports, those positions come with strict rules. Out of a team of seven, only two players are allowed to shoot and score goals from a defined area of the pitch.
Like most team sports, the objective is to win by scoring more goals than the opposing team. My job as a defender was twofold: first, to stop the other team from scoring, and second, to get the ball into our attacking half and trust our shooters to do their job.
Measurement works the same way. You can plan the perfect strategy, execute flawlessly, and still miss the goal. You don’t win just because you kept possession, had a strong passing game, or played in front of a packed audience.
A team that dominates possession but never scores is like a marketing team obsessed with engagement metrics that don’t lead to real results. The best netball teams don’t justify failure with surface-level stats. They analyse every pass, turnover, and moment where the game could have gone differently, then adapt accordingly. Measurement in marketing should do the same: provide insights that shape your next move, not just validate past efforts.
If your campaign didn’t deliver the right results, what happened? Did you track the wrong things? Did the creative, media mix, or targeting miss the mark? Were expectations wrong from the start?
The number of impressions, clicks, shares, or engagements doesn’t matter if, at the end of it all, you missed your goal.
You’re measuring halfway – and it shows
So why do we keep getting this wrong? In a nutshell, they’re jumping ship halfway.
Measurement works in three levels. . First, outputs: Did the campaign run? (e.g., reach, impressions, clicks). Second, outtakes: Did it influence behavior? (e.g., brand perception, purchase intent).
And finally (because we love alliteration in this business) outcomes: Did it impact business results? (e.g., sales, market share, customer acquisition). These are the only things that matter.
It’s worth recapping these because far too many brands stop at stage one. Marketers love using shiny metrics to prove a campaign is watching its face. But follower counts, video views, engagement spikes – they’re all meaningless if they don’t feed into a bigger picture. Measurement isn’t about collecting the most data. It’s about knowing which data matters.
Cut your cloth, measure what matters
You have to work within your budget and focus on the measurements that give you the best shot at making impactful decisions. If you’ve got the budget for full-scale econometrics, brilliant. You have to work within your budget and focus on the measurements that give you the best shot at making impactful decisions.
Because not all metrics are equal. Some are pure hygiene factors, telling you whether a campaign has run but not whether it worked. Others – like long-term customer acquisition trends – are harder to track, but infinitely more valuable.
Take top of funnel metrics such as brand awareness and consideration. There are some performance marketers who roll their eyes at them, but there’s real predictive power in those metrics. They’ve been quantified by some of the best econometricians, who will say if consideration goes up by1% point increase in consideration can be expected to drive a 0.5%–1.5% increase in base sales.. That’s not fluff – it’s a proven indicator of business growth at scale.
The mistake is treating all metrics the same and giving them the same weight of importance. If you do this, you risk making decisions based on noise rather than insight. And if there’s one thing worse than not measuring at all, it’s measuring everything and learning nothing.
Stop measuring for the sake of it
As an industry we are obsessed with data. We collect it, clean it, visualise it – but for what? If it doesn’t provide a tangible view on how to improve, it’s not a useful measurement.
Before you pull another report together, ask yourself: What decision is this helping me make? If the answer isn’t clear, stop wasting your time.
Returning to my netball analogy, marketing isn’t about passing the ball around for the sake of it. You need to be making high-impact decisions that get the ball closer to the net – because while racking up possession stats may look good, it won’t win the match.
