Your Marketing Measurement Is Broken: Here’s How to Fix It
How much of your marketing is actually driving results, and how much is simply getting credit for them?
In this episode of The Marketer Exchange, Zach Thompson sits down with Ryan McClurkin, investor and co-founder of Insighta, to explore why traditional marketing measurement is broken and what marketers should be doing differently.
Ryan spent years leading advanced analytics from the brand side, where he saw firsthand the problems created by short-term ROAS, click-based attribution, incomplete customer journeys, and marketing data that doesn’t always align with the numbers finance sees.
We break down why measuring today’s ad spend against today’s revenue can lead to bad decisions, why last-click attribution misses much of the customer journey, and why customer lifetime value should play a much bigger role in marketing investment decisions.
Ryan also explains the three approaches marketers can use to build a more complete picture of performance: multi-touch attribution (MTA), marketing mix modeling (MMM), and incrementality testing. We discuss what each one tells you, where each falls short, and how they can work together.
Then we look ahead. Ryan explains how AI agents and Model Context Protocol (MCP) could change the way marketers interact with data, moving beyond fixed dashboards toward a world where marketers can ask questions of their data in natural language and get answers in minutes.
Finally, Ryan shares his advice for students and young marketers entering the industry, including why learning to work effectively with AI agents could dramatically increase the value you bring to an organization.
In this episode:
• Why marketing measurement is broken
• The problem with short-term ROAS
• Why last-click and click-based attribution miss the bigger picture
• Customer lifetime value and measuring future value
• Multi-touch attribution (MTA)
• Marketing mix modeling (MMM)
• Incrementality and geo-based testing
• Why marketing and finance often see different numbers
• How AI and MCPs could transform marketing analytics
• Why tomorrow’s marketers need to learn how to work with AI agents
If you work in marketing, analytics, performance media, or are preparing to enter the industry, this conversation will change the way you think about what “measurement” actually means.
You can find out more about Ryan’s work at insighta.io