One of the most interesting aspects of my role as a Forrester analyst is hearing marketers ask questions about how others in their position or industry are approaching measurement. A common fear I hear is that “everyone else” in a client’s competitive set has figured things out and the client brand is being left behind.

To help assuage these fears, we recently analyzed data from Forrester’s Marketing Survey, 2024, to uncover the state of B2C marketing measurement. While marketing measurement is still a work in progress for most companies, marketer confidence in their ability to measure marketing’s business value accurately and consistently is high. Fewer than 5% of marketers say that they have not been able to prove the long-term impact of marketing. But between data deprecation, fragmentation of channels, and increasing consumer complexity, marketing analytics and measurement isn’t getting any easier. Here are three takeaways from our analysis:

  • Marketers manage a broad set of metrics. Revenue growth remains the top metric used by marketers to gauge both the business impact of marketing and the performance of individual marketing initiatives, but they are also being asked to track customer outcomes (i.e., satisfaction, loyalty, retention, profitability) and increase brand value. Twenty-nine percent of marketers say they routinely use brand value to measure and attribute the incremental business value of marketing, up from 19% in 2023.
  • Tools and resources are major drivers of measurement confidence. The marketers who are most confident in their ability to measure marketing’s incremental business value are also the most confident in the ability of their tools, teams, and data to meet their needs for timely insights. This portends a potential future split between the haves and have-nots, where ability to accurately measure is dependent on investing today in measurement technology, data, and teams. Brands that are not yet investing in creating a measurement-informed culture will only find it more difficult to catch up going forward.
  • Data issues remain the top marketing measurement challenge. Data challenges continue to make marketers’ measurement jobs tougher. Too many unconnected data sources and inconsistent levels of quality among data sources hold them back from making use of measurement and analytics, and B2C marketers continue to lose trust in third-party data, which impacts their ability to measure granular audience segments. Sixty-eight percent of marketers are reevaluating their third-party data partnerships.

For more detailed insights into how B2C marketers are thinking about measurement, read our recent report, The State Of B2C Marketing Measurement, 2024.

In the coming months, I’ll also be publishing reports on data requirements for marketing measurement, how to build strong measurement teams, best practices for extracting value from your marketing mix model, and how generative AI is impacting the marketing measurement landscape. If you would like to discuss your own approach to marketing measurement and how to prepare for the future, schedule a guidance session here.