Kauri Ballard, Senior Director at Analytic Partners
The post-campaign review meeting is going well. Numbers are up, the deck looks good, someone's already talking about scaling it next year.
Then one person asks the killer question: did the campaign actually drive sales, or would the sales spike happen anyway?
There’s an awkward silence, not because it's a bad question, but because it's the right one - it’s just been asked three months too late to do anything about proving it.
I’ve seen this pattern so many times across client engagements.
The problem isn’t the modelling, the dashboards or the technology. It’s that nobody agreed on what needed to be measured before the activity launched, so the data that would have answered the question was never collected.
It’s a multi-million dollar challenge which is holding a lot of businesses back and stopping them getting the most from their measurement investments.
Put simply their strategy will miss the mark because critical pieces of data were never collected, structured or made available in the first place.
And often, those gaps don't become obvious until someone asks a question the business can't answer. Why did market share suddenly decline? Why did one campaign outperform another?
The challenge is that by the time those questions are being asked, the opportunity to capture the right data may well have passed.
One of the most common areas I’ve seen of this in play is sponsorship. Australia is a sporting nation and a good sponsorship property can be an incredible investment for brands of all sizes.
To prove this they need to understand the impact on awareness, consideration, sales or customer acquisition.
But when it comes time to evaluate performance, they often discover the only information they can actually glean is a high-level summary report or annual results data.
That’s not because someone made a mistake and deleted a line in a spreadsheet - it's simply that nobody considered what data would be needed to demonstrate efficacy before the partnership began.
The same challenge crops up across influencer activity, partnerships and other emerging channels like LLMs. Marketers may know when content was posted, but not when impressions were actually delivered. They may receive performance reports, but not the level of detail required to properly understand impact.
So while you, as a marketer, may know an activity mattered, you’ll continue to run up against the same wall of being unable to prove it until this foundational data audit is complete.
Most of the time it’s not a lack of data causing these challenges - we’re all drowning in more of it than ever before.
They're caused by a lack of planning, and not knowing exactly what data your business has accumulated, where it's stored, what quality it's in and what it can tell you.
It’s not enough to simply know you have data - you must be intentional about it.
That’s why one of the most valuable questions marketers can ask is, what decisions do we want to make six months from now? A year? Even two years out? The answer should shape the data being collected today.
If a business wants to compare the performance of two creative executions, those assets need to be identifiable within campaign reporting. If both are grouped under the same campaign identifier, that comparison becomes impossible.
Or if a business wants to understand the impact of specific offers, operational changes or customer initiatives, those variables need to be tracked consistently from the outset.
In other words, measurement starts long before the data capture itself.
Closing these gaps rarely requires bigger budgets or new technology. In most organisations I work with, the data already exists in places like sales records, call centre logs, customer complaints, promotional activity.
The problem is it lives in separate teams, in separate systems and nobody has connected it to the marketing measurement question.
The first step is understanding what you already have, where it lives and whether it can help answer the questions the business actually cares about most.
Measurement doesn’t begin when the analysis starts. It begins when you decide what you’re going to measure and make sure the infrastructure is in place to capture it. That conversation needs to happen before the campaign launches, before the sponsorship is signed, before the influencer brief goes out.
The next time someone asks the killer question in that post-campaign review, the answer doesn’t have to be silence. But only if the right decisions were made long before the results came in.