Measure: marketing attribution and what we count.
Before a dollar is spent, every campaign, page and enquiry is instrumented, and every source is recorded once, in one place.
You cannot diagnose what was never recorded.
Most measurement problems are recording problems. An enquiry arrives with no record of what brought it. A form posts to an inbox nobody reads. A phone call is never attributed to anything. By the time someone asks which campaign produced the pipeline, the answer has gone, and what is left is an opinion with a chart behind it.
The measure stage is the work done before spend starts, so that the question can be answered later. It is unglamorous, it takes a week or two, and it is the reason the other two stages are possible.
The work in the measure stage.
- i Definitions agreed Every measure the campaign will be judged on is written down with its formula and its source system, so two people reading the same report read the same thing.
- ii Tracking installed and proven Analytics, conversion events and call tracking are installed, then tested with a real enquiry that is followed all the way through to the system it has to land in. An untested tag is not a measurement.
- iii One source of record Enquiry source is captured at the moment the enquiry arrives and stored with the enquiry itself, rather than inferred from a platform report weeks afterwards.
- iv A baseline taken The current position is recorded before anything changes, so the first optimisation has something to be read against.
- v One report, one cadence The same definitions, the same place, the same interval. A measure that is reported two ways is reported once.
Marketing attribution, without the argument.
Two records answer the attribution question better than one model does. The first is what the systems saw: the last campaign, ad or page a person touched before they enquired, recorded automatically. The second is what the person said: one short question on the enquiry form asking how they came across the project, in their own words.
They disagree often, and the disagreement is the useful part. A project whose systems credit paid search while its buyers keep naming a signboard is telling you something no attribution model would have said on its own.
Neither record is treated as the truth. Both are kept, both are read, and a channel is judged on the enquiries it can be shown to have had a hand in rather than on the ones a model assigned it.
Measure hands the next stage a question.
- THE LOOP How we measure The framework the three stages belong to: what is counted, what each measure means and what each one decides.
- 02 Diagnose The measures read in pairs until one pair names the constraint.
- 03 Optimise One change at a time, against the measure that named the constraint.
Measurement is the first stage of the operating loop. What follows it is diagnosing where the funnel loses the enquiry.
Trust-led marketing for an evolving era.
Three forces are reshaping how buyers research, evaluate and make high-value decisions.
