TL;DR

Marketing and communications measurement has a value problem. We’ve gotten better at collecting data and connecting efforts to business outcomes, but we still tend to define value too narrowly, either by what’s easiest to measure or by what happens at the very end of the journey.

Revenue absolutely matters when revenue is the objective. But marketing and communications creates business value long before a transaction happens by building visibility and understanding, earning trust, shaping preference, strengthening relationships, protecting reputation, and reducing risk.

The goal isn’t to make marketing and communications less accountable. It’s to measure what the work was actually designed to accomplish and recognize both what we can directly attribute to those efforts, and what marketing and communications contributed to making it possible.

Key Insights

• Revenue matters, but it isn’t the entire value chain. When revenue is the objective, measure it. But don’t ignore the value created before the transaction.
• Marketing and communications creates measurable value throughout the journey. Visibility, understanding, trust, preference, relationships, reputation resilience, and risk reduction are meaningful business outcomes.
• Leading indicators matter. Revenue is often a lagging indicator. Changes in awareness, trust, consideration, or behavior can tell us whether communications is moving audiences toward the desired outcome.
• Contribution and attribution aren’t the same thing. Attribute outcomes directly when you can. When you can’t, demonstrate the role communications played in creating the conditions that produced them.
• AI is exposing how interconnected the journey really is. AI visibility is shaped by an ecosystem of owned content, earned media, social conversations, third-party citations, and other credibility signals that accumulate over time.
• Start with the business outcome, not the metric. Define what you’re trying to influence, identify what needs to change along the way, and measure the value marketing and communications creates across that journey.

What Your Marketing and Communications Measurement is Missing

It’s a tale as old as time.

OK, maybe not quite that old. But if you’ve worked in marketing or communications for more than about five minutes, you’ve probably been part of some version of this conversation.

Supervisor: “How did the campaign perform?”

MarComm team member: “Great! We secured 37 media placements, generated 12 BILLION impressions, improved CTR, lowered cost per lead, and increased website traffic. Oh, and the CEO was quoted in a top-tier publication, plus, everyone loved that LinkedIn post.”

Supervisor: “OK. But what does that mean for the organization?”

And…scene.

Marketers and communicators have been wrestling with this question for decades. And it’s true that we’ve gotten better at measurement. We have tons of data, sophisticated dashboards, models, social listening platforms, media intelligence tools, and now an entirely new category of AI visibility tools promising to tell us how our brands are showing up in generative search.

And yet, marketing and communications teams still struggle to answer a deceptively simple question: what value did our work create?

There are really two problems. The first is that we still have work to do as an industry to connect marketing and communications activity to meaningful business outcomes. The second is that even when we do a great job of measurement, we have a hard time defining “value.”

Marketing and communications can create visibility, understanding, credibility, trust, preference, stronger relationships, reputation resilience, behavior change, and, yes, ultimately revenue.

Sometimes revenue is the objective; sometimes it isn’t. But value is being created throughout that entire journey.

If we only measure what happens at the end, or default to the handful of metrics that are easiest to put on a dashboard, we’re missing a huge portion of the value our work is creating for the business.

The good news is that this doesn’t require another complicated measurement framework. It comes down to three questions your team need to ask.

We’ll get to those. But first, we have to rethink what we mean by value.

The Revenue Trap with Measurement

Part of the problem is that MarComm teams are under enormous pressure to prove their value and prove it fast. 

Teams are being asked to do more with fewer resources, and AI has accelerated expectations for how much we should produce, how quickly we should produce it, and what we should be able to measure.

So, of course, leadership wants to know what they’re getting for their investment. They should! 

If we’re asking an organization to invest time, money, and resources into our work, we should be able to explain what that work is intended to accomplish and whether it worked.

The trap is in how we answer the question.

Our industry has traditionally focused on numbers that were easiest to produce: media placements, impressions, mentions, likes, shares, CTR, cost per lead, MQLs, last-click ROAS, engagement, and website traffic. Some of those can be incredibly useful data points when they’re connected to a larger strategy. On their own, though, they tell us what happened, not necessarily what changed because of it.

At the other end of the spectrum is revenue. It’s tangible, leadership understands it, there is a dollar sign attached to it, and when revenue is the objective of a communications program, we absolutely should be working to connect our efforts to it.

But that can create a different version of the same trap: assuming that if we can’t directly attribute revenue to a marketing or communications activity, then the activity didn’t create meaningful business value.

That’s where we get ourselves into trouble.

A marketing or communications program may be designed to protect reputation and maintain stakeholder confidence, establish an executive or organization as an authority on an issue, change behavior, or increase understanding before anyone is ready to take action.

Those should all be measured, but measuring them against all revenue would make no sense.

The first question, then, shouldn’t be, “How much revenue did this generate?” It should be, “What was this program designed to accomplish?”

That sounds simple, but it fundamentally changes the conversation about measurement. It forces us to start with the business outcome rather than the metric. 

And it opens the door to a much more important question: what if the program is creating significant business value that we aren’t accounting for?

Revenue Isn’t the Whole Story

None of this means we should run away from revenue. If revenue is the business outcome we’re trying to influence, we should be looking for every credible way to connect our work to it.

But think about everything that has to happen before someone buys something from you.

They have to know you exist. They have to understand what you do. They have to believe you can solve whatever problem they’re trying to solve. They have to trust you. They have to see a reason to choose you over the dozens of other options competing for their attention.

And somewhere along the way, they actually have to take action.

We could think about that journey like this: first comes visibility, then awareness, and understanding. From there, we can build trust and preference, which can lead to engagement, action, and ultimately, revenue.

This is not intended to be another funnel. Please, for the love of all things marketing, we do not need another funnel.

People don’t move neatly from one box to the next; they bounce around, search, read an article, ask AI, see a social post, and do it all over again. It’s an ecosystem, which is exactly why the PESO Model® works as an operating system rather than a collection of individual tactics.

But the simplified journey helps illustrate something important—value is being created at every one of those points. This is where leading and lagging indicators become useful.

Revenue is typically a lagging indicator. By the time it happens, a lot of other things have already happened first. Visibility, awareness, understanding, trust, preference, engagement, and consideration can all serve as leading indicators. They help us understand whether marketing and communications is creating the conditions necessary for the business outcome we’re ultimately trying to influence.

Attribution vs. Contribution

And that brings us to a distinction marketers and communicators need to get much more comfortable making: attribution versus contribution.

Attribution asks, “Did our work cause this outcome?” Contribution asks, “What role did our work play in creating the conditions that produced this outcome?”

Both marketing and communications have struggled with this, just in different ways. Communications has often been under-attributed because the connection between the work and the eventual business outcome can be difficult to prove. Marketing can have the opposite problem where attribution models can assign too much credit to the touchpoints we can track most easily, often right before conversion.

Last-click attribution is a perfect example. If someone reads an article, sees an executive interviewed, encounters the brand several times on social media, asks AI for a recommendation, visits the website, and eventually clicks a paid ad before becoming a customer, last-click attribution may give the ad all the credit.

That’s precise, but it isn’t necessarily accurate.

The ad may have closed the loop, but it didn’t create the entire journey that led to the decision. At the same time, we can’t simply give every preceding interaction credit for the sale either.

That’s why the distinction matters. Sometimes attribution is possible, and when it is, we should use it. But when multiple interactions work together to produce an outcome, contribution gives us a more complete way to understand the role each played.

The mistake isn’t measuring revenue. The mistake is assuming that whatever we can most easily connect to revenue deserves all the credit. You can’t put a gauge on a system that isn’t running as a system. 

If we want to understand the value marketing and communications actually contribute to the business, we have to look at the entire system that helped create the outcome.

Where Marketing and Communications Creates Value

So, what does that value actually look like?

This is where we have to get beyond the idea that anything short of the final business outcome is somehow not a valuable business result. If visibility, understanding, trust, or preference has to change before someone takes action, then changing those things has value.

The key is knowing what we’re trying to change, why it matters, and how we’ll know whether it happened. Let’s take a look at a few of them and how you might measure their value. 

Awareness and Visibility

Before someone can trust you, recommend you, work for you, advocate for you, or buy something from you, they generally have to know you exist.

That makes visibility a legitimate business outcome, particularly when the challenge is entering a new market, introducing a product, reaching a new audience, or competing in a crowded category.

But visibility is more than generating a giant impression number and calling it a day.

We can measure whether awareness is increasing, whether our share of voice is changing relative to competitors, whether more people are searching for the brand, whether we’re reaching the audiences that actually matter, and increasingly, whether we’re visible when people ask AI platforms questions related to the topics we want to own.

Visibility is often one of the first ways our work creates value, long before a transaction ever occurs.

Understanding and Education

Being visible is great, but people need to understand what you do and why they should care.

Marketing and communications can help an audience understand a problem, clarify what makes an organization different, correct misconceptions, reduce uncertainty, and prepare people to make a decision later.

We can measure that through message comprehension and pull-through, changes in audience perception, content engagement, search behavior, audience research, and even the types of questions customers and stakeholders are asking.

Trust and Credibility

This is where integration through the PESO Model becomes particularly powerful.

Owned media gives us the opportunity to consistently demonstrate expertise around the topics we want to be known for. Earned media adds independent credibility and corroboration. Shared media lets other people react to, discuss, validate, and sometimes challenge those ideas. Paid media can amplify the strongest messages and content to the audiences we need to reach.

When those pieces reinforce one another, we’re not simply generating more content. We’re creating evidence that makes trust possible.

That can show up in brand trust and reputation research, message credibility, executive or subject-matter-expert authority, quality earned media, third-party citations, recommendations, and whether credible sources increasingly associate the organization with the topics it wants to own.

No single media type does all of that on its own. The integration is what creates the value.

Preference and Consideration

Knowing you and trusting you still aren’t the same as choosing you.

Awareness says, “I know who you are.” Preference says, “I’d choose you.”

Marketing and communications can help move an audience between those two points by establishing differentiation, reinforcing the right brand associations, demonstrating expertise, building familiarity, and giving people reasons to include one organization in their consideration set rather than another.

We can measure changes in brand preference and consideration, purchase intent, recommendations, competitive positioning, message association, and other indicators to assess whether audiences are becoming more likely to choose the organization.

And this is where contribution becomes especially important. Preference is rarely created by a single interaction. It’s built through the accumulation of experiences, messages, recommendations, content, and third-party validation that give someone a reason to choose one organization over another.

Trying to assign all the credit to whichever interaction happened closest to the decision can obscure everything that helped create the preference in the first place.

Engagement and Relationship Building

Our work builds relationships with audiences long before we need them to buy, advocate, defend, recommend, or even pay attention to us.

I’ve always thought about this as an emotional bank account. Every useful interaction, helpful piece of content, meaningful conversation, or positive experience is a deposit. You build up that account over time, so there is actually something there when you eventually need to make a withdrawal.

We can look at the quality and depth of engagement, repeat interactions, advocacy, loyalty, community participation, referrals, audience feedback, and whether people are choosing to maintain a relationship with the organization over time.

Those relationships create value today while making future action more likely tomorrow.

Reputation Protection and Risk Reduction

And then there is value created by something not happening.

Nobody asks how much revenue was generated by the crisis that never happened. But there is enormous value in identifying an issue before it becomes a crisis, correcting misinformation before it spreads, building media relationships before you desperately need them, maintaining stakeholder confidence during uncertainty, or creating enough reputational resilience to withstand a mistake.

These efforts create value by reducing the probability and potential impact of negative ones. We can measure preparedness, stakeholder confidence, shifts in sentiment and perception, response effectiveness, reputation strength, and even whether inaccurate or damaging narratives are appearing in search and in AI-generated answers.

That value may never produce a neat conversion event on a dashboard. Neither will trust, authority, preference, or the strength of a relationship. But that doesn’t make any of them less valuable.

AI and Measuring Marketing and Communications Value

AI didn’t create this problem, but it is making it a lot harder to ignore.

Think about how people search for information every single day. Someone opens ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or another AI platform and asks for a recommendation.

Let’s say your organization shows up in the answer. Great! But why?

Was it the article your CEO wrote six months ago? The media coverage you earned last year? The subject matter expert who has been consistently talking about the issue? Your website content? Customer reviews? Social conversations? Third-party citations? Something published five years ago?

The answer is probably some combination of all of it. Research into millions of AI citations shows that different AI platforms rely on different ecosystems of earned, shared, owned, video, and other sources.

Spin Sucks founder and PESO Model creator Gini Dietrich recently wrote about how often people ask her which tool she uses to measure and improve AI visibility. They want the platform, the dashboard, the easy button.

According to Gini, her answer is far less satisfying. Basically, Spin Sucks has been publishing content consistently for nearly 20 years.

That’s the tool.

Of course, AI platforms and visibility tools can help us understand and improve how a brand appears in AI-generated answers. But there isn’t a single tactic responsible for building the authority, credibility, and trust that make a brand visible in the first place.

It’s accumulated over time. It can’t be attributed to a single piece of content. 

But you can measure whether the ecosystem is working by looking at whether your organization appears in relevant AI answers, how often it is cited, which sources influence those answers, whether the right narratives are associated with your brand, and how your visibility changes over time.

That’s contribution versus attribution playing out right in front of us.

AI didn’t create the attribution problem. It exposed just how interconnected the journey has always been.

Measure the Value, Not Just the Transaction

Where does all of this leave us?

It certainly doesn’t mean we stop measuring revenue, or that we get to shrug and say that marketing and communications is too complicated to measure. And we shouldn’t simply retreat to impressions, media placements, engagement numbers, CTR, or cost per lead metrics. 

It means we need to get better at measuring the value our work is actually designed to create. That starts with three questions.

1. What business outcome are we trying to influence?

Start there, not with the channel, the tactic, or whatever happens to be easiest to pull from the dashboard.

Are we trying to generate revenue? Build reputation? Increase adoption? Change behavior? Improve retention? Reduce risk? Build awareness? Strengthen preference? Earn trust? Maybe several of these? 

The answer should determine what comes next. This is also why the PESO Model starts with the business outcome and the audience decision we’re trying to influence, rather than jumping straight into paid, earned, shared, and owned media. The channels are how we get there, but they aren’t the objective.

2. What needs to change before that outcome can happen?

If revenue is the objective, what has to happen before someone buys?

Maybe they need to become aware of you. Maybe they already know you exist, but don’t understand what makes you different. Maybe awareness and understanding are strong, but trust is the problem. Maybe people trust you, but still prefer a competitor.

Those are not consolation prizes on the way to the real business outcome. They’re part of the value chain.

Identify the changes your team needs to create, then measure whether they’re actually happening. That’s how leading indicators become useful rather than just another collection of disconnected metrics.

3. What can we attribute, and where should we demonstrate contribution?

If we can directly connect marketing or communications activity to an outcome, fantastic. Do it.

But don’t manufacture attribution where it doesn’t exist, and don’t give one measurable touchpoint all the credit simply because it’s the easiest one to track. Sometimes, the more credible answer is to demonstrate contribution and show how multiple parts of the system worked together to create the outcome.

That’s not lowering the standard for accountability. It’s making the standard more sophisticated. Because marketing and communications create value long before someone fills out a form, makes a purchase, signs a contract, applies for a job, changes a behavior, or takes whatever final action we’re hoping to influence.

We should absolutely be accountable for business outcomes. But if we’re only measuring the transaction at the end of the journey, we’re not measuring the full value of communications.

And chances are, we’re creating a lot more of it than we think.

The question is whether your marketing and communications systems are actually designed to create, connect, and measure that value across the entire journey.

Here’s what we see most often when we look under the hood of a measurement program: the problem is rarely a lack of data. 

Teams are measuring everything and connecting almost nothing. The dashboards are full, every channel has its numbers, and nobody can say which changes along the journey actually moved the business outcome. In nearly every engagement, the gap isn’t between the metrics and the truth. It’s between the metrics and each other.

If that sounds familiar, the PESO Model Diagnostic® is a fast way to see whether your program is running as a connected system or a collection of well-measured parts.

And if you’re heading into planning season with numbers your leadership team isn’t buying—you have the data, but not the narrative that connects it to the business—that’s worth a conversation with us before the budget meetings start. We’ll tell you whether the gap is in your measurement or in your architecture.

Because the goal isn’t to find more things to measure. It’s to make sure we’re measuring what matters, and getting credit for the value your work is already creating.

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