TL; DR

Most marketing and communications pros aren’t bad at measurement—they’re stuck in a process built to fail. They’re asked to report activities and outputs, then judged on outcomes nobody asked them to measure. The data lives in a dozen places, pulling it takes hours, and every handoff strips out context until the numbers reach the CEO with no story attached. Add agencies measuring their own way, and you get three scoreboards and no shared definition of winning. 

The fix isn’t more data or a fancier dashboard. It starts with organizational goals, measures each PESO Model® media type for its job, puts one owner and one scorecard in charge, and reports what the numbers mean—not just what they are.

Key Insights

• Teams are asked to report activities and outputs—releases, placements, posts, open rates—and then leadership gets frustrated that nobody can say what drove the organization’s goals. The request and the expectation don’t match.
• The monthly data pull is a relay race: pull, procrastinate, hand off, trim, report, repeat. Every handoff strips out context until the numbers arrive at the top with no story attached.
• Data is scattered across web analytics, media monitoring, social, email, the CRM, and paid platforms, and rarely does one person or team have access to all of it. Every piece of the chain exists. Nobody holds the chain.
• Fixing measurement starts with the two or three goals the organization cares about most, then works backward to metrics. Owned and earned get measured on authority and corroboration; shared and paid on reach, engagement, and conversion.
• Every report should answer three questions: what worked, what didn’t, and what you’ll change. An AI prompt can turn a pile of numbers into a first-draft story in minutes, which also cures the Thursday-night procrastination.
• Buying a dashboard usually makes the problem prettier, not better. The hard part is organizational—getting leadership to agree on what winning looks like and getting every team and agency to report against the same definitions.

Why Your Marketing and PR Measurement Isn’t Telling Leadership What Worked

It’s Tuesday, and you’ve been forwarded a note from someone on the executive team that says, “Can you pull the numbers for the board deck? Need them by Friday.”

No problem. 

Except “the numbers” live in Google Analytics, the social scheduling tool, the media monitoring platform, the email platform, the CRM you don’t have a login for, and a PDF the agency sends on the 15th that isn’t due yet.

So it takes four hours. Maybe six. Which is why it doesn’t happen on Tuesday. Or Wednesday. It happens Thursday night, with a glass of wine and a lot of copying and pasting.

Then the spreadsheet goes to someone else—a manager, a director, whoever’s building the deck—who may or may not understand what those numbers say about that particular discipline. They take out the ones that look confusing (or bad). They round a few things. They add a chart.

The deck goes up. And the CEO looks at it and asks the only question that matters, “So what actually worked?”

Silence.

Next month, you do it all again.

If that feels familiar, I want you to hear this first: it’s not you. 

This exact scene plays out in organizations of every size, with teams who are smart, capable, and working really hard. 

The problem isn’t the people. It’s the process they’ve been handed.

This Is Deeply Frustrating 

Before we get to the fix, let’s name the one thing that doesn’t get said out loud often enough.

Measurement is one of the most frustrating parts of the job. Not because we don’t care about results. Because we care a lot. The challenge is that there is no uniform way to measure the work we do, so many of us can’t prove it.

So the story typically goes…you spend a month doing good work. You land a story you’ve been chasing for a year. A piece of content takes off. A LinkedIn post from your CEO starts a real conversation with a prospect. And then the report that goes up says “impressions: 1.4 million” and “posts: 22,” and nobody in the room can connect any of it to the thing the business actually cares about.

That’s demoralizing. And over time, it does real damage. It’s how the work we do gets labeled as a cost center. It’s how budgets get cut first. It’s how smart people start to feel like their work doesn’t matter.

It does matter! It matters a ton. You just haven’t been given a way to show it.

Problem One: You’re Asked for Activities, Then Judged on Outcomes

This is the biggest challenge we see with brands, and it’s the root of almost everything else.

Teams are asked to report activities and outputs. How many news releases went out? How many placements? How many posts? Follower growth. Open rates. Website visits. The list goes on and on.

Those are the things that are easy to count, so they’re the things that get requested.

And then executives are upset—sometimes openly, sometimes in that quiet, disappointed way that’s way worse—because nobody can tell them what worked to drive organizational goals and what didn’t.

Think about how unfair that is. You were asked to report the activity. You reported the activity. And now you’re in trouble for not reporting the outcome.

We have to shift our own mindset from “what did we do this month?” to “what changed because of what we did—and what are we going to do differently next month?”

In many cases, we also have to shift the mindset of the people asking, which isn’t always easy (and sometimes can feel impossible). 

And nobody ever asks, “What changed because of what we did—and what are we going to do differently next month?” so nobody built the measurement to answer it. 

And to be fair to the executives, most of them don’t know what to ask for, either. They ask for activity because that’s what they’ve always received. It’s a loop, and someone has to break it.

That someone…is you. (Or my team and me if you want our help because this is what we really geek out on!)

Problem Two: The Data Relay Nobody Wins

Let’s go back to that Tuesday request, because the process itself is part of the problem.

Here’s how it works in most organizations:

• Someone logs into five or six platforms and exports the data. It takes hours, because nothing talks to anything else.
• Because it takes hours—and because it feels like busywork—it gets pushed to the last minute. (I’m not judging. I’d procrastinate, too.)
• The data goes to someone else who wasn’t involved in the work and may not understand what the numbers mean in that discipline. A 12% open rate might be great for one list and terrible for another. A drop in social followers might be the result of a deliberate cleanup. Context doesn’t survive the email.
• The person building the report pulls out the numbers they don’t understand or that they think look bad, even though those are often the most important numbers.
• What’s left goes into a deck. No interpretation. No recommendation. Just numbers.
• And then, the following month, we do it all over again. 

It’s a game of telephone with a spreadsheet. Every handoff strips out a little more context until the numbers arrive at the top with no story attached. And then everyone is surprised when the story is missing.

Nobody understands what anyone is doing or why—not the person who pulled the data, not the person who built the deck, and definitely not the executive reading it.

Problem Three: Nobody Can See the Whole Picture

Even if you fixed the relay, you’d run into the next wall, which is that the data is everywhere.

Web analytics sits with the digital team. Media monitoring sits with PR. Social data lives in one tool, email data in another. The CRM belongs to sales, and good luck getting a login. Paid media data sits with whoever runs the ads—which might be a different department, or an agency, or both.

There’s rarely a single person or team with access to all of it. So nobody can connect a piece of earned media to the traffic it drove to an owned page to the lead that page created to the deal that closed. 

Every piece of the chain exists. Nobody holds the chain.

And then you add agencies.

Every agency sends its own report, measured in its own way, using its own definitions of success. 

The PR firm reports placements and share of voice. The paid media agency reports cost per click and ROAS. The social agency reports engagement rate. 

None of them is measuring what the brand is actually being asked to deliver, because nobody told them what that is, or they were told, but that’s not how they report their work.

In the D S Simon Media survey of brand and agency PR execs, brands named the lack of clear measurement as their number one barrier. And agencies named it as their fifth barrier to working with clients. 

I know I’ve already pontificated about this, but it makes me die a little inside every time I think about it. Brands say measurement is their number one challenge. Agencies say it’s their fifth.

The left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing!

This also shows up in how each side grades itself. Eighty-seven percent of agency respondents said they were successfully optimizing earned media for AI discovery. Only 59% of brands said the same.

That’s a 28-point gap between the people doing the work and the people paying for it. When the vendor is that much more confident than the buyer, it’s not because one of them is lying. It’s because they’re grading different tests.

So now you have the brand’s scoreboard (the one leadership wants), the agency’s scoreboard (the one in the monthly PDF), and the internal team’s scoreboard (whatever they could pull by Thursday night).

Three scoreboards. No shared definition of winning.

How to Fix It: Start With the Goal and Work Backward

So, the good news is that none of this requires a six-figure analytics platform or a data science team or for you to be a numbers genius. 

It requires changing the order in which you do things.

Start with organizational goals, not platform exports

Most measurement starts with what the tools can export and works forward. 

Flip it.

Start with the two or three goals the organization actually cares about this year. Revenue growth in a specific segment. Reducing sales cycle length. Recruiting in a tough market. Protecting reputation through a leadership change. Getting recommended by AI search when prospects ask about your category.

Then ask: what would we need to change to move that goal? And what would we see if it were working?

Those answers are your metrics. Everything else is the supporting cast.

Measure each PESO Model media type for its job

This is where the PESO Model® earns its keep, because not every media type should be measured the same way.

Owned and earned are the visibility engine. Owned media builds depth, authority, and proof. Earned media creates third-party validation that transfers credibility back to you. 

Measure them on authority and corroboration. 

In other words, ask yourself:

• Are your key claims showing up in credible third-party sources? 
• Is earned coverage pointing to owned content that goes deep enough to be cited? 
• Are AI systems and search engines citing you when prospects ask the questions you want to win?

Shared and paid are the amplifiers. Shared distributes and reinforces. Paid extends what’s already working. 

Measure them on reach, engagement, and conversion: 

• Did the right people see it? 
• Did they act? 
• What did it cost to get them there?

I remember several years ago, Mr. D had had a flurry of really great media placements for his business. Over dinner, he complained that no one he was talking to from a fundraising perspective had seen those articles or put two and two together during the meeting, even though the articles were in top-tier business publications. 

I asked him if they had considered putting a little paid boost behind the stories, targeting his major funders. 

He said no—and then he was mad that he and his team hadn’t thought of that. (I had to remind him this is why I’m paid the big bucks.)

But the point is this: when you aren’t measuring the outcomes, you don’t see the forest for the trees. You say, “Yay! We got feature stories in all of our top-tier pubs!” You don’t ask, “And…so what?”

You need to ask, “So what?”

One owner, one scorecard

Someone has to hold the chain. It doesn’t have to be an entirely new role or a new hire. It has to be one person or team with the authority to request data from everyone, and the responsibility to connect it.

And there should be one scorecard—the brand’s—that every internal team and every agency reports into. Not four PDFs on four schedules. One view, tied to the goals you just defined.

That means you hand your agencies your scorecard, not the other way around. 

If they push back, that tells you something, too.

Report what the numbers mean, not just what they are

This is the part that gets lost in the relay, and it’s the part executives actually want.

Every measurement report should answer three questions:

1. What worked?
2. What didn’t?
3. What are we going to change because of it?

That’s it. The numbers are evidence for the answers, not a substitute for them.

And here’s where AI can actually help, especially as a fix for procrastination. Once you’ve pulled the data into one place, give it to your AI tool of choice with a prompt like this:

“You’re a measurement analyst. Here are this month’s results across owned, earned, shared, and paid media, along with our three organizational goals for the year: [goals]. For each goal, tell me (1) which activities appear to have moved it and what evidence supports that, (2) which activities didn’t move anything, and (3) two specific changes you’d recommend for next month. Flag any numbers that need context before an executive sees them—like a drop that might be intentional or a spike that might be a one-time event. Write the summary in plain language for a CEO who has three minutes.”

It won’t be perfect. You’ll need to correct it because it doesn’t know whether the follower drop was a bot cleanup or whether the traffic spike came from a Reddit thread. 

But it gets you from a pile of numbers to a first-draft story in minutes instead of hours—and editing a story is a lot easier to make yourself do than building one from scratch at 10:00 on a Thursday night.

What to Do On Monday

You don’t have to fix all of this at once. Here are three things to start with.

1. Map where your data lives. Make a simple list: every platform, spreadsheet, and vendor report that holds communications or marketing data, and who has access to each one. Most teams have never seen this list, and it’s usually longer than anyone expected. The gaps in access are your first agenda item.
   
   We like to create a form and ask everyone with access to the data to fill in their part: their name, title, email address, and the data they report on and where it lives. Then we take that form and create a single spreadsheet to work from.
   
2. Ask your executive one question. Not “what do you want in the report?”—that gets you more activity. Ask, “Which two organizational goals do you most want us to help move this year?”
   
   Write down the answer word for word. That’s the top of your scorecard.
   
3. Send your agency your scorecard before they send you theirs. Even if it’s rough. Even if it’s one page. Tell them what the organization is being asked to deliver and ask them to report against it starting next month. You’ll learn a lot from how they respond.

The Part Most Teams Underestimate

Here’s what usually goes wrong when teams try to fix measurement on their own.

They buy a dashboard.

It’s a reasonable instinct. The data is scattered, so put it all in one place. This might look like Power BI or Looker Studio. 

It sounds good and sophisticated—and it is, but most programs don’t need that level of sophistication…at least not yet.

But a dashboard is only as good as the decisions behind it, and most teams skip the decisions. They connect every data source, build 40 charts, and end up with a prettier version of the same problem: lots of numbers, no story, and executives still asking what worked.

The hard part is not the software—it never has been. 

The hard part is getting leadership to agree on what winning looks like, translating those goals into metrics for each media type, getting agencies and internal teams to report against the same definitions, and building the habit of interpretation so the report says something every month. 

That’s organizational work, not technical work—and it’s the part almost everyone underestimates.

It’s also the conversation we have at the start of nearly every engagement. The teams that do it first get a scorecard that leadership actually trusts. The teams that skip it get another dashboard nobody opens.

How We Build a Measurement Spine

This is exactly why we built our measurement spine work.

Think about it this way. Your body has more than 200 bones, and they only work together because a spine connects them. Your program works the same way. 

You have web analytics, media monitoring, social data, email, the CRM, and three different agency reports. 

Right now, that’s a pile of bones. The spine connects every one of them to the goals the organization actually cares about.

So when we do this work with a team, we don’t start with a tool. We start by sitting down with leadership and agreeing on what winning looks like this year. 

Then we turn those goals into metrics for each media type and map where every piece of data lives and who owns it. (That’s the form I mentioned.) 

We write the definitions that every internal team and every agency reports against. And we build a monthly rhythm that turns numbers into answers: what worked, what didn’t, and what we’re changing.

Only then do we talk about whether you need a dashboard. Sometimes you do. But more often than you’d think, a well-built spreadsheet and a really good monthly story will get you further than Power BI ever will.

What you have at the end isn’t more data. Instead, it’s one scorecard your leadership trusts, and an answer ready the next time the CEO asks, “So what actually worked?” 

And let me tell you, the first time you answer that question without the awkward silence feels pretty great.

Where to Start

If you want to know where your measurement breaks down (which media type you can’t connect to results, and whether it’s a data problem or a definition problem), take the PESO Model® Diagnostic. It’s free, it’s scored, and you can take it as often as you’d like.

If you’d rather build the whole system yourself, including a measurement framework that ties all four media types to business goals, the PESO Model Certification® walks you through it step by step.

And if you’re juggling three agency reports, a board deck due Friday, and a CEO who keeps asking what worked, let’s build your measurement spine before the next reporting cycle starts.

© 2026 Spin Sucks. All rights reserved. The PESO Model is a registered trademark of Spin Sucks.