Why do marketers so often refrain from setting aside budget for marketing measurement?
It is fair to say that there is currently a very significant mismatch between the scale of the marketing measurement problem that marketers themselves acknowledge and the reality of how much money they normally put aside for remedying it.
On the one hand, we have 60% of marketers saying that internal stakeholders (perhaps the CFO), question their metrics, while 67% say that ROI proof is their top priority, when in reality only a small per cent actually put money aside for solving the problem.
Common Reasons Marketing Measurement Is Underfunded
There are many possible reasons why: they may expect their agency(ies) to produce the accurate ROI calculations they need at no cost, they may be thinking of doing it in-house, or they may simply not know how to go about it or how much to budget for it.
Why Agencies and In-House Teams Struggle With Measurement
The difficulty with the agency solution is that it’s then a case of their marking their own homework, and if trust is required, then an independent source of the truth is needed.
The problem with doing it in-house is that it requires both specialist technology and considerable statistical experience to get it right. The technology is required to deliver multi-touch attribution (MTA), where customer journeys, both online and offline, need to be joined together, and a weighting is made of the significance of each step in each journey.
Statistical skills are required to build the econometric models (MMMs) that are required to give a true view of the incremental effect of marketing.
How Much Budget Should Be Allocated to Marketing Measurement?
So, if the solution is to find an external marketing measurement provider, the question then becomes how much budget should be allowed for it?
There are no commonly available yardsticks, so we decided to put the question to Perplexity and received the following response:
Typical Benchmark Ranges for Marketing Measurement
- Entry-level / basic tracking: 3–5% of media spend, usually covering web analytics, basic reporting, and limited attribution.
- Standard performance-focused teams: 5–10% of media spend, funding proper multi-channel tracking, incrementality tests, and some external tools or light consultancy.
- Advanced / data-driven marketers: 10–15% of media spend, where robust MMM, MTA, experiments, and specialist partners are used to drive continuous budget reallocation and ROMI gains.
What Marketers Actually Pay in Reality
However, our own experience as an external provider of marketing measurement services is significantly different. The following table gives an overview of the level of charges that in reality, we find marketers are prepared to pay:
Cost of marketing attribution as % of marketing budget
| Complex marketing requires MMM + MTA | 2.5% – 5.0% | 1.0% |
| Simple marketing requires just MTA | 1.0% – 2.5% | 0.5% |
| Low budget <1m | High budget >10m |
Here, we may be getting closer to understanding why marketers don’t budget for marketing measurement, which is because they fear it is going to cost too much.
Proving ROI From Marketing Measurement
Clearly, whatever is spent on marketing measurement needs to have its own ROI calculation, and this is where case studies are required to highlight examples of the returns obtained.
As no two businesses are the same, one cannot borrow an expected ROI from another company’s experience, but they do provide a level of benchmarking which may be useful:
Case Study: A Global Cruise Line
- 50% improvement in ROI from a very significant spend in PPC
- an accurate understanding of channel effectiveness in each region
- a clear indication of which markets provided the highest potential
Case Study: A Large-Scale Wine Retailer
- CMO obtained an increased marketing budget based on board-level confidence in the metrics he was using
- The new customer acquisition strategy showed a 76% uplift in sales
- CRM campaigns using direct mail and email were fine-tuned
Case Study: A Major Travel Company
- £250k per annum saved on CFRM direct mail costs without loss of sales
- CMO is able to justify his budget to the board
- optimised budget allocation across channels
How Marketing Measurement Delivers ROI Across the Business
As you will see from these examples, there is no single area where marketing measurement will in reality provide better returns, as its impact will be felt across all channels and all customer segments.
However, in our experience, these are the more common ways in which measurements create their own ROI:
- provision of a sound basis from which a CMO can justify their marketing budget, because the incremental effect is proven
- an understanding of the impact over time of brand marketing and its contribution to other channels
- optimising budget allocation across channels and also across different times of year
- Reducing waste on campaigns that are not performing
- provision of an understanding of which customer segments respond best to which types of marketing
Conclusion: Marketing Measurement Is an Investment, Not a Cost
In conclusion, marketers need not be fearful of the costs of using trustworthy independent providers of marketing measurement, because money spent in this way, rather than simply spending a tiny fraction more on media, can provide trust in what they are delivering, plus very significant returns, and can put the entire marketing activity on a sound ROI footing.
Julian Berry is an accomplished marketing technology leader. Julian spent his early career working directly under renowned direct marketer Christian Brann. He then held senior marketing roles at NatWest and LTSB before establishing several successful consultancies. He founded UniFida in 2014, and pioneered multi-touch attribution platforms that help marketers measure and optimise marketing value across channels.
