Go pull up last month's digital marketing performance report.
Which channels are converting best?
For LOTS of marketing teams, the answer is paid search.
Paid campaigns are driving some good conversions— so you keep funneling budget there.
But something doesn't feel quite right.
We all know the ad platforms’ in-app reporting is absolute junk.
But what’s missing?
If you’ve ever worried that you're missing something in your digital marketing reporting, you're not alone.
Many marketers still rely on last-touch attribution to measure success and guide spend.
But.
Last-touch attribution leaves serious revenue on the table.
Let’s say a prospect searches for your product on Google.
They click your paid search ad, and complete a purchase/lead conversion.
Last-touch gives 100% of the credit for that conversion to the paid search campaign.
Seems logical, right?
Nope— it’s actually total B.S.
In reality, a prospect's path to conversion is never a straight line.
The typical customer journey involves multiple touchpoints across various channels over an extended period of time.
They might…
As Ian, a seasoned marketing manager, puts it:
"We have this kind of fundamental understanding that we're not going to see a dime from [upper-funnel campaigns] for maybe 6 months to a year down the road. But, we need to continue it. Just because we can't track it immediately doesn't mean it won't blossom into other channels."
It’s true— top-of-funnel marketing generally takes longer to deliver ROI than bottom.
(Ian’s 6-12 month example above is for a leadgen marketing initiative on a long-lead-cycle business.)
But there are some other obvious examples we should look at for inspiration.
John Moran, Tier 11’s Head of Traffic Strategy, compares it to TV—
"YouTube, for example…no one clicks on YouTube ads. I've never clicked on a YouTube ad in my life and bought anything. But YouTube does VERY well in influencing people. It's like a TV commercial or Super Bowl ads. They do influence well, but they get poor attribution."
Ever wonder how Dunkins or Temu measured the impact of their onslaught of Super Bowl 2024 commercials?
Spoiler: it wasn’t ROAS.
Last-touch struggles to make sense of our chaotic digital landscape.
Plus there are complicating factors like privacy laws and tech limitations.
Europe has GDPR. CCPA was first in the US, but 18 other states have passed similar privacy regulations so far.
Then there’s the loss of third-party cookies. In 2024 and beyond, it’s impossible to connect the dots between touchpoints.
And Google Analytics 4 still has serious gaps, like stitching sessions together in often misleading ways.
(Remember when GA4 was touted as a solution to all this??)
Last-touch paints an incomplete picture. So what's the solution?
Shift your focus to business-centric metrics and benchmarks that show business-level performance.
"Attribution is based on ‘Could the platform track it? And if it did, how much of it could it track?’
That's the ONLY thing it measures.
—John Moran, Tier 11 Head of Traffic Strategy
We’ve been over this— ROAS is garbage. You need to ditch it immediately.
Instead of relying on flawed in-platform metrics, marketing teams should use benchmarks on numbers that really matter.
We call these Marketing Performance Indicators.
New Customer Acquisition Cost (nCAC)
| Total ad spend ÷ # of new customers |
nCAC shows the efficiency of your acquisition efforts. A lower nCAC means more customers per dollar spent. Use nCAC to:
Media Efficiency Ratio (MER)
| Total revenue ÷ Total ad spend |
MER is measurement of marketing ROI, showing how effectively ad spend generates revenue.
Higher is better. Similar to ROI, a higher MER means more revenue earned per dollar spent.
MER helps you:
1-3-6-12 Month Lifetime Value (LTV)
These LTV checkpoints measure average revenue per customer over a few time periods.
They show compounding value of retention and repeat purchases and measure profitability over time.
Compare LTV to CAC/nCAC to figure out your CAC Payback period—how long will it take to earn back your acquisition cost?
Uses for LTV measurements:
By establishing benchmarks for these metrics, you can identify which activities are moving the needle on your revenue generation and profitability.
This is how you can make better decisions about budget allocation and optimization.
For example…
Monitoring nCAC and LTV cohorts tells you:
This approach forces you to look at the big picture of how your marketing is impacting the business.
NOT just what's easily trackable in your favorite ad platforms.
Evolving your attribution approach is scary at first, but the benefits are worth it.
Here’s how:
Capture enough data
Start by ensuring you're capturing data on as many customer touchpoints as possible.
This may require deploying additional tracking tools and tags.
Ask your analytics team or agency partner to implement the necessary tracking and reporting.
This is exactly what X-ray Tag is for, by the way.
Educate your team
It's crucial to get buy-in and alignment from stakeholders across marketing and sales.
This is a significant shift in thinking.
A new approach to HOW you measure and manage will require some discussion.
Bottom line: measure dollars, not clicks.
Benchmark early and often
CAC, MER, and LTV are all lagging indicators— they get calculated after the investment or activity occurs.
They’re only useful as measurements if they have comparison points from before the changes took effect.
Establish your baselines early, and check in on them regularly:
For ecom, that could be daily or weekly. For leadgen, it’s probably weekly or monthly.
One of the best parts of this method is that it helps keep everyone accountable for wins and losses—especially your marketing agency.
It’s like John tells it…
"The worst part about a vendor-vendee relationship is their metrics look good, but your business is dying. We want to have marketing and sales working together so that we know exactly how many leads are coming in, if they're good quality, and where to go get more of those."
With this method, your agency won’t be able to hide behind fluff numbers like ROAS anymore.
The marketing measurement is evolving at a breakneck pace.
Privacy regulations are tightening, and customer journeys are twisting and turning in new directions.
The future belongs to businesses bold enough to take a more full view—to embrace the complexity of the modern customer journey and orient their efforts around meaningful, measurable growth.
Don't let outdated attribution hold you back any longer.
At Tier 11, we help clients solve their attribution challenges and uncover powerful full-funnel insights.
Our strategic framework prioritizes metrics like nCAC, LTV, and MER to help clients understand the true impact of their marketing efforts and make smarter decisions.
Our experienced strategists will work hand-in-hand with you to:
Take the first step towards maximizing your digital marketing ROI - contact us to see how Tier 11 can help your business leverage full-funnel measurement.