From My Desk: Are We Still Measuring the Wrong Marketing Metrics?

Marketers have always loved a number.

Whether it's follower count, impressions, clicks, open rates or ROAS, every ‘new’ platform brings another metric to optimize and another dashboard to refresh.

I talk to brands of all shapes and sizes every day — from startups making their first agency hire to enterprise marketing teams rethinking their strategy. One question comes up consistently: Which metrics actually matter?

Today, many of the metrics we've relied on for years are less useful than they once were. Not because data matters less, but because customer journeys are far less predictable and far more fragmented. Someone might discover your brand through a creator, see you appear in AI search, hear about you from a post their friend shared, then make a purchase weeks later after searching your name directly.

So which channel gets the credit? Increasingly, that's the wrong question.

The better question is: What interactions tell us we're building a brand people actually remember?

Instead of obsessing over perfect attribution, marketers should be looking at the bigger picture. Is branded search increasing? Are your customers returning for a second purchase? Are people saving and sharing your content? Is direct traffic growing?

On their own, these metrics only tell part of the story. But together, they reveal whether your marketing is creating demand or simply capturing it.

That shift also changes what brands should expect from their agency partners. The right agency won't promise a magic ROAS target or claim credit for every conversion (and you should steer clear of the ones who do). They'll ask smarter questions from the start: What does success look like six months from now? Which metrics actually align with your business goals? As marketing grows more complex, strategy matters just as much as execution.

So yes, finding the right agency is that important. When success depends on more than a single KPI, you need a partner who understands your business — not just your media budget.

And if there’s one thing I can promise you, it’s that you’ll find the right agency on Breef (speaking from facts and thousands of case studies, of course).