Joanna Stringer has 25 years of experience in driving marketing and brand-led growth for businesses across a broad spectrum of industries. Today, she leads client work and thought leadership on marketing, customer experience, customer demand, and innovation at BCG.
It's time for a marketing measurement upgrade. A recent Gartner survey revealed that only 52% of CMOs and other senior marketing leaders were successful in demonstrating marketing's impact on business outcomes.
This problem stems from a growing measurement capability gap, with traditional methods falling short.
The stakes are high: wasted budgets, flawed decisions, and marketing's perceived lack of value.
My team at BCG is determined to help marketers close this gap. We've worked with Google to create a practical, data-backed 24-month roadmap to media effectiveness maturity. It’s designed to help you build your in-house capability to maximise your marketing ROI — and prove the impact of your marketing investments, once and for all.
The 4 phases of the media effectiveness roadmap
The journey to media effectiveness isn't always linear and you may go back-and-forth between different stages. However, this roadmap clarifies when to focus your efforts on particular steps and secure stakeholder buy-in and alignment in four key areas:
Months 1-3: Building a measurement foundation
It's common knowledge that unlocking the true power of your marketing measurement starts with a solid foundation: a cross-organisational KPI framework. Yet our latest study reveals a striking gap: just 39% of U.K. advertisers report that a standardised marketing KPI framework is widely used in their organisation.1
This KPI framework aligns everyone in the organisation, from top to bottom, towards shared goals. This is a rarity today. Only 10% of surveyed advertisers in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) currently achieve fully integrated, real-time collaboration with KPIs linked to business goals.2
Take inspiration from a major British supermarket. They revolutionised their media effectiveness by creating a council of stakeholders from different departments. This team collaborated to source critical questions, identify the right metrics, and refresh their KPI framework, ensuring everyone was on the same page from day one.
Months 4-9: Planning with precision
To navigate today's fast-paced market, you need a measurement strategy that's as quick as your decisions need to be. That's where smart planning comes in.
Start with a learning agenda to guide your strategic decisions. “This means pre-agreeing investments with your finance team based on the expected results,” explains Dimi Mitev, a full-funnel effectiveness measurement lead at Google.
“For example, you might agree upfront to invest £1M if the return-on-ad-spend of an experiment is 5X, or invest £2M more if the return is 8X. A learning agenda helps you move fast, rather than get stuck in analysis paralysis.”
Our data proves it: companies in the EMEA region with learning agendas tied to business objectives are 9.2X more likely to report top-quartile profit growth.3
Then there's the marketing mix model; your spend allocation guide. This uses historical data to reveal the link between marketing and business outcomes. A well-implemented MMM routinely improves marketing ROI by 10% and often as much as 20-30%.4 The upper end of this range is only achievable, however, with MMMs that bring sufficient granularity and frequency of data refresh.
A learning agenda helps you move fast, rather than get stuck in analysis paralysis
“We’ve seen some exciting innovations in MMM methodologies recently, including from Google’s Meridian,” explains Mitev. “Coupled with granular media data, they can optimise returns in new ways. It’s even possible to connect brand equity metrics, so you can measure both the short-term and long-term ROI of your marketing investments.”
Months 10-18: Establishing experimentation practices
Next, ensure you're being smart about measuring the impact of your marketing experiments. That's where incrementality testing comes in. By comparing two groups of people — one that has been exposed to a campaign and one that hasn’t — you can isolate the true impact of your marketing efforts. This allows you to understand how different activities contribute to your business goals across diverse channels and advertising platforms, bridging cross-channel measurement gaps.
Whether you opt for user-based or geo-based incrementality tests (or both), it’s key to prioritise quality over quantity. Instead of spreading your efforts thin with numerous experiments, focus on executing one or two well-designed tests.
If you want to determine the net new in-store sales driven by video ads, for example, you can run a geo-based incrementality experiment to compare similar regions with and without ad exposure. This targeted approach delivers tangible results.
Finally, resist the temptation to go for the most advanced tool in every experiment. “For instance, if you want to know if AI campaigns work better for you than legacy ones, or how different bidding strategies can maximise your returns, you’re better off starting with a simple A/B test or a causal impact analysis,” adds Mitev.
To ensure you select a fit-for-purpose measurement solution, start with the decision you want to make. Ask yourself: What is the insight that will inform it and what is the most cost/resource/time-efficient way to get that? For example, run a conversion lift or geo-experiment if you want to prove to finance that your investments are driving net new sales. This approach ensures every experiment is purposeful, driving you closer to your desired outcomes.
Months 19-24: Transforming insights into impact
It's time to shift gears from knowledge to action. Experiments and learnings are crucial, yet 68% of U.K. advertisers only review the insights from learning agendas in an ad-hoc manner.5 Furthermore, they use them inconsistently in their spend decisions.6
This is the time to ensure your experiments don’t go to waste. Apply your insights to make better investment decisions.
One of the biggest challenges is persuading the budget holders, especially when they sit in other parts of the organisation. An insight is value-less if it does not influence a decision: this is make or break.
This is why we see cross-organisational alignment as one of the most important steps in building a measurement foundation. Without the ability to drive influence on budgeting decisions, marketing effectiveness cannot make a difference to an organisation — ever.
Work together to translate insights into actionable plans, using the pre-agreed actions from your learning agenda. Also establish a centralised knowledge hub to prevent valuable learnings from fading and to enable scaling across the organisation.
An insight is value-less if it does not influence a decision
A leading Italian consumer goods company implemented a learning repository and a scaling council to demonstrate the power of structured learning. This approach empowered their local teams to leverage insights without having to duplicate experiments, maximising efficiency and impact.
To drive even further results, tap into AI for real-time insight activation. AI allows for consistent application of insights, enabling you to calibrate solutions dynamically and drive always-on improvements.
And, remember, measurement maturity isn't a one-time achievement; it's an ongoing evolution.
“As you reach this final stage, it's time to evaluate your approach and begin the cycle again, armed with a refined roadmap to guide your way,” says Mitev.
