How much of your marketing budget goes towards activity you can measure, rather than activity you believe delivers the greatest commercial value?
It's a question worth asking in manufacturing, or indeed any industry where the easiest outcomes to track aren't necessarily those making the biggest contribution to revenue.
For example, improving how customers research, compare, and specify products online could have a tremendous commercial impact, but demonstrating that impact is hard, particularly when the eventual sale happens months later, or through a distributor or a retailer.
For Heads of Marketing and Digital, this presents a difficult challenge. You're expected to demonstrate a return on investment and make informed decisions about where to spend your budget, but the available evidence you can gather naturally means you might favour doing certain activities and undervalue and ignore others.
The problem with focusing on what you can measure
In May 2026, the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) published Go Big or Go Home, research from Les Binet and Will Davis examining the relationship between marketing efficiency and effectiveness.
The research challenges the growing emphasis on short-term performance and efficiency measures, arguing that optimising for immediate, easily-measured returns (short-term tactics) can come at the expense of longer-term, sustainable commercial growth.
Lead-generation campaigns might deliver measurable opportunities within weeks. Improving the digital experience for customers researching technical products, strengthening brand preference among specifiers, or supporting distributor sales could influence commercial performance over a much longer period.
Both types of investment need to be accountable, but evaluating them against the same short-term measures and ROI can produce misleading comparisons.
Does your reporting provide enough evidence to assess the relative value of those investments, including activity whose contribution may only become apparent months later?
Different manufacturers need different measures of success
Gartner's August 2026 research, The Metrics CMOs Find Most Effective to Prove the Value of Marketing, highlights the importance of CMOs taking an active role in shaping analytics priorities and using a diverse range of metrics to demonstrate marketing's contribution to the business.
For manufacturers, the measures that matter should reflect your commercial model, the customer, and the outcomes your business is trying to achieve.
A manufacturer supplying building products through merchants may be focused on increasing specification of particular ranges. An industrial equipment manufacturer might prioritise qualified opportunities for its sales team. Another business may want to improve customer self-service, reduce support costs, or increase sales through its existing distributor network. Each requires a different understanding of performance.
If increasing product specification is the objective, technical-content engagement, specification enquiries, project registrations, and subsequent product sales may all provide useful evidence. For a business focused on qualified opportunities, the relationship between enquiries, sales acceptance, pipeline progression, and eventual revenue becomes more important.
Where customer self-service is the priority, successful task completion, avoidable support contacts, and changes in service costs may be more informative than conventional website conversion measures.
These indicators need to be interpreted in the right way, of course. An increase in technical downloads doesn't automatically mean more products are being sold, just as an increase in enquiries doesn't necessarily mean more revenue.
Why connecting your data matters
Manufacturers often have useful information spread across multiple systems, with limited visibility of how it all connects.
Website analytics show you customer behaviour and product interest. CRM systems record enquiries and opportunities. ERP platforms contain orders and sales information. Product information systems provide the detail needed to understand performance across ranges and categories.
Individually, these systems can produce extensive reports. The difficulty is pulling the data together and understanding what those reports can reveal collectively.
You might, for instance, see growing interest in a specific product range online, while your commercial team reports stronger sales through distributors. Establishing whether those developments are related becomes difficult when product classifications differ, reporting periods don't align, and information cannot be compared across systems.
Connecting relevant data can improve visibility without requiring every customer interaction to be tracked all the way through to a transaction though. For example, combining product-level digital engagement with CRM enquiries and sales reporting can help identify where interest is translating into commercial opportunities, which ranges are performing well, and where further investigation may be needed.
But it can also expose questions that individual reports might miss. Why is one product category attracting considerable interest but generating relatively few qualified enquiries? Are particular markets showing increased engagement without corresponding commercial growth? Is marketing investment concentrated on products that already have strong demand rather than those that need to be shifted?
These are questions that can influence decisions about campaign investment, product content, customer experience, sales support, and your overall marketing plan.
What your website analytics aren't telling you
One of the limitations of digital reporting is that it can tell you what customers are doing without explaining whether they're achieving what they came to do.
For example, a technical specification download could indicate that a customer is evaluating a product for a major project. It could equally be an existing customer looking for installation information. The recorded interaction is identical, but its commercial significance may be very different.
For manufacturers with extensive product catalogues, complex specifications, and multiple customer audiences, this can make conventional engagement metrics especially difficult to interpret.
Doing some customer research can help establish what different audiences are trying to achieve, how they make decisions, and where they encounter difficulties. Combining that understanding with behavioural analytics provides a stronger basis for evaluating your digital performance.
Consider a manufacturer investing in a new product-finding experience on their website. Increased engagement with the product finder might look encouraging, but it doesn't establish whether customers are finding suitable products more successfully.
Measuring task completion, product-selection accuracy, and the quality of subsequent enquiries would provide a more meaningful assessment. Customer interviews and usability testing could then help explain the results and identify opportunities for improvement.
This approach would also help you recognise the value of improvements that don't necessarily generate additional leads, but do improve your overall digital experience, such as making technical information easier to access, helping customers identify suitable products, or reducing unnecessary contact with sales teams.
Knowing what worked is harder than knowing what converted
Attribution provides valuable information about the marketing interactions associated with recorded conversions. But it has limitations when used to establish how much additional business your marketing investment has generated.
Check out Google’s Conversion Lift methodology. It uses treatment and control groups to estimate incremental conversions generated by advertising, rather than relying solely on attributed conversions.
What does that all mean? Well, a campaign may receive credit for conversions that would have happened anyway. Equally, activity that strengthens product preference or helps customers make purchasing decisions may contribute to revenue without receiving appropriate recognition in attribution reporting.
For manufacturers, structured experimentation can help provide stronger evidence of marketing impact.
A manufacturer improving product discovery could establish baseline performance, test changes with relevant customer groups, and assess whether more users successfully identify suitable products. You could then examine whether those improvements are associated with better enquiry quality, fewer avoidable support requests, or changes in commercial performance.
Of course, factors such as pricing, seasonality, availability, distributor activity, and changes in customer demand, all need consideration when interpreting results. The aim though is to develop enough evidence to make better marketing investment decisions, whilst recognising where uncertainty remains.
Five questions to ask about your marketing measurement
Improving marketing measurement doesn't necessarily mean introducing more KPIs. It may however mean challenging whether the information you already report on is actually helping the business make the right decisions.
1. Are our KPIs influencing investment in the wrong areas?
Consider whether your reporting encourages investment in activities that deliver commercial value, or whether it favours those producing the most easily attributable results. This is particularly important when comparing short-term demand generation with longer-term improvements to customer experience and market position.
2. Are we measuring outcomes that reflect how our business makes money?
Different commercial models require different measures. Product specification, distributor demand, direct sales, and customer self-service all create value in different ways. Your reporting framework should reflect those differences.
3. What commercially-important customer behaviour are we missing?
Look beyond conventional marketing engagement metrics to understand whether customers are successfully researching, evaluating, and selecting your products. Customer research can help identify which interactions matter and where better measurement is needed.
4. Where is disconnected data limiting our understanding?
Examine whether information from your digital platforms, CRM, ERP, and other systems can be brought together to answer meaningful commercial questions. Focus on the connections that would improve decisions, rather than attempting to integrate everything for the sake of doing so.
5. What evidence would help us make our next investment decision with greater confidence?
This could involve additional customer research, more consistent reporting, a controlled experiment, or better use of existing commercial data. The most useful next step depends on the decision being made and the potential value of getting it right.
Getting more value from your marketing investment
Manufacturers are unlikely to achieve perfect attribution across every customer interaction, particularly when purchasing decisions involve multiple stakeholders, lengthy buying cycles, and indirect sales channels.
There is, however, considerable scope to improve the quality of the evidence used to evaluate marketing and digital investment.
That starts with understanding what your business is trying to achieve, how customers interact with your products and services, and which measures provide a meaningful indication of progress. Connecting relevant information across systems, combining analytics with customer research, and testing the impact of changes can all contribute to more informed decisions.
At DotCentric, we bring together digital strategy, customer research, UX, technology, and continuous optimisation to help manufacturers understand how their digital experiences perform and where improvements can deliver commercial value.
From examining how customers find and evaluate products to identifying opportunities for better measurement, integration, and optimisation, our focus is on helping businesses make more effective use of their digital investment for both short-term and long-term growth.
If you're reviewing how marketing and digital performance is measured across your business, we'd welcome a conversation.
