Counting Steps Is Not Walking Anywhere Interesting

How the obsession with measurement precision is quietly replacing the harder question of whether marketing is actually working.

There is a particular kind of confidence that comes from a well-populated dashboard. Numbers in columns. Percentages going up. Green indicators where green indicators should be. It feels like knowledge. It looks like accountability. And in many cases, it is neither.

The marketing industry has developed an extraordinary appetite for measurement. That instinct is healthy in principle. The problem is that measurement has gradually shifted from being a tool that serves strategy to being the thing that determines it. We no longer measure what matters. We do what is measurable.

This distinction sounds subtle. It is not.

Consider last-click attribution, which dominated digital marketing for the better part of a decade. The model was simple. Whoever touched the customer last before a purchase received the credit. The result was predictable. Budget flowed towards retargeting and branded search, the channels that reliably sat at the end of the journey, while the awareness and consideration activity that created the journey in the first place was starved of investment. The dashboard looked excellent. The growth engine was running on fumes.

Last-click has fallen out of fashion, but the mentality behind it has not. Multi-touch attribution replaced it, promising a more balanced view. In practice, it introduced a different set of distortions. The models are complex, the assumptions are opaque, and the outputs still reward what is easiest to track rather than what is most important.

The deeper problem is that the metrics the industry has gravitated towards are proxies, not outcomes. Click-through rates measure whether someone tapped a screen. They do not measure whether someone remembered the brand, changed their perception, or became more likely to buy next time they entered the category. Impressions measure whether an ad was served. They do not measure whether it was seen, processed or felt. Views, depending on the platform, might mean two seconds of passive exposure or two minutes of active attention. The same word describes entirely different events.

This imprecision would matter less if everyone acknowledged it. The trouble is that dashboards present these numbers with a confidence that implies certainty. A campaign that delivered fourteen million impressions and a 1.2 percent click-through rate sounds like it achieved something specific. Whether it actually moved the business forward is a separate question, and one that the dashboard is not designed to answer.

There is also a structural incentive problem. Platforms, vendors and agencies all benefit from metrics looking healthy. Not through deliberate dishonesty, in most cases, but through definitional drift. What counts as a view, an engagement, a conversion, or an impression varies by platform, by format and sometimes by campaign. The result is an ecosystem where everyone is reporting success using slightly different rulers, and the advertiser is left trying to compare numbers that were never meant to be compared.

The consequence is that marketing increasingly resembles a discipline of optimisation rather than a discipline of growth. Teams are rewarded for improving metrics within a campaign rather than for improving the commercial outcomes the campaign was supposed to deliver. The distinction between efficiency and effectiveness is lost in the noise.

None of this is an argument against measurement. Good measurement is essential. The argument is against mistaking the measurement for the thing being measured. A map is useful precisely because it is not the territory. When the map becomes the objective, you end up optimising your route without ever asking whether you are heading somewhere worth going.

The brands that get this right tend to share a common trait. They measure with discipline but decide with judgement. They use data to inform, not to replace, the harder conversations about what their marketing is actually trying to achieve. They are comfortable with the idea that some of the most important effects of advertising are difficult to quantify and that difficulty is not a reason to ignore them.

Counting steps is easy. Walking somewhere interesting requires knowing where you want to go.

Curious how others see it.