When I first started working in marketing, I was amazed by all the data I suddenly had access to. Conversion tracking, funnel reports, A/B testing: it felt like everything could be measured. I am trained as a quantitative researcher in the social sciences, so data and measurement come naturally to me. And yet, within months, I found myself doing half of my marketing work without any data to support it. Why? Because not everything that matters can be measured. And, not everything we can measure actually matters.
Now, years later, as someone who teaches online marketing to students, I see the same pattern repeating and it worries me. So much of what we teach focuses on performance marketing: impressions, clicks, conversions, ROAS and dashboards full of KPIs. But very little attention is given to the real heart of marketing: understanding your audience, shaping your message and building something that resonates.
In this post, I want to talk about a problem I see over and over again in digital marketing. Both in practice and in education, we’re measuring the wrong things and it’s steering us in the wrong direction.
The temptation of the measurable
Digital marketing gives us an incredible amount of data. And that data can make us feel in control. It allows us to optimize, tweak, compare and report. However, that same data can also become a trap.
Many metrics we use today, like clicks, conversions or last-click attribution, are based on the idea that marketing causes direct, trackable effects. Someone sees your ad → clicks your link → buys your product. Simple, right?
Unfortunately, it’s almost never that simple.
Real influence doesn’t always show up in your dashboard
If you’ve studied communication science (like I have), you know this already:
- People are influenced socially by their networks, their peers and their environment.
- Audiences are diverse, not passive and don’t all respond the same way.
- Marketing effects are rarely direct: they build over time.
Yet most marketing measurement today is based on direct effects: one click, one conversion, one source. We obsess over funnels and click-through rates while ignoring all the invisible, unmeasurable things that actually move people.
In my marketing efforts, I try to focus on brand, messaging, standing out and creating something unique. When I did marketing at Yoast, we spent lots of time building message houses and thinking about creative ways to get our messages across. I still work that way, but talking to other marketeers, I often notice that I am the only one doing marketing that way. It appears that most marketeers focus on A/B-testing, tweaking their websites and with that trying to improve performance just a little bit.
Measuring the end of the funnel (and missing the rest)
When you focus too much on what’s measurable, you tend to zoom in on the very end of the funnel. The place where someone converts. The problem is: by the time they get there, most of the influence has already happened.
You didn’t see the blog post they read a month ago. Or the conversation they had with a friend. Or the moment they saw your brand mentioned on LinkedIn and thought, “Oh, that sounds familiar.”
If we only measure the final step, we start optimizing only for that step. And we risk ignoring all the important work that happens earlier: storytelling, brand building, positioning — the things that create real, lasting impact.
So what now?
This doesn’t mean we should stop measuring altogether. But it does mean we need to be more critical and intentional about what we measure and what conclusions we draw from that data.
Some of the most valuable things in marketing, such as trust, reputation and brand awareness, won’t show up in your analytics tool. And that’s OK.
The goal isn’t to track everything
The goal is to do marketing that matters and then figure out the best ways to see if it’s working.
In future posts, I’ll dive deeper into how audiences really respond to marketing (hint: not the way dashboards assume) and why unmeasurable effects are sometimes the most important of all.
Until then, remember: not everything that counts can be counted. And not everything that can be counted, counts.
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