Clicks. Likes. Opens. Leads. These are the numbers marketers have been trained to chase because they’re easy to get, easy to report on and easy to manipulate.
But ask any CMO how much incremental revenue those clicks really drove, and the answer often comes with a shrug.
It’s not that marketing isn’t working. It’s that we’re measuring the wrong things.
Marketing measurement has long been dominated by what Forrester calls ‘vanity metrics’. They look good in a dashboard but say little about business impact. Think CTRs, impressions, open rates.
According to the Data & Marketing Association (DMA), 41% of marketing metrics in use today fail to reflect actual effectiveness. They’re easy to obtain, but hard to translate into outcomes that matter in the boardroom. And worse, they're incomplete. Vanity metrics tend to cover only digital activity, while many impactful marketing efforts happen in the offline world. When you only measure what’s easy to track, you miss the bigger picture.
The result? Many CMOs undersell marketing’s true value. Budget requests are questioned. Strategies are misunderstood. Growth potential is left untapped.
The landscape has changed. Privacy regulation, rising CPAs and economic pressure mean there is no room for waste. Marketers must prove impact, not just activity. But the gap between what we can measure and what we should measure is holding many teams back.
Here’s the shift we need to see: from platform-attributed performance to independent, incrementality-based impact.
Marketing Mix Modelling (MMM) is a proven methodology that helps quantify the true contribution of marketing to business performance. It answers the questions vanity metrics never will.
What MMM can do:
This level of clarity helps CMOs translate marketing outputs into commercial outcomes.
Platform ROAS is inflated by default. It counts all conversions that happen after someone sees or clicks an ad, even if they would have converted anyway. Incremental ROAS strips out the noise and focuses only on revenue that was actually generated by marketing efforts.
It is one of the most reliable ways to understand campaign efficiency and communicate marketing’s impact to stakeholders.
To stay in control of their own budgets, CMOs need to move from vanity metrics to impact metrics. Here’s what that shift can look like:
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At Objective Platform, we help marketers cut through the noise and focus on what matters. Our MMM solution brings together your media, business and market data to show what is working, what is wasted and where to invest next.
If you are still steering spend based on CTRs, it might be time to rethink your approach. Better measurement is not just a reporting upgrade, it’s a competitive advantage.
Let’s talk. We’ll show you how better measurement leads to better decisions and stronger business outcomes.
