Beyond the Click: How Marketers Can Now Rethink Measurement

Privacy rules have dimmed the data marketers used to navigate. In the boardroom, finance now asks for harder evidence, while many reports still celebrate the last touch. That mix pushes money toward the bottom of the funnel and starves the upper funnel, which makes growth more expensive. What works is a measurement system that sees the full journey and stands up in front of decision makers. 

This was the through line at a recent ClickZ session with Fospha and Google. The conversation treated measurement as an operating system for growth, not a tidy report after the fact. 

The Turning Point 

Dom Devlin, Chief Product Officer at Fospha, put it plainly. 

When reporting favors the final click, budgets follow it. Over time that pattern raises acquisition costs and slows reach. The opportunity is to rebuild the foundation so investment reflects reality across the journey, not only the last step that happens to be easy to log. 

Building a Better System 

Brandon Klausner, a measurement product lead at Google recommended that measurement strategy focus on building a system that works in concert, rather than relying on a single tool or model as source of truth. In practice that means using Attribution for quick directional readouts, relying on Incrementality when you need causal proof to move money, and letting MMM anchor budgets and the wider plan. Treated as one workflow, the picture stays consistent enough to brief a CFO with confidence. 

Klausner’s test for quality is simple and pragmatic. 

Consistency beats elegance. A system that updates and holds its shape across quarters will outlast a clever model built for last year’s environment. 

Revealing What Dashboards Miss 

A lot of impact never shows up where the sale happens. Fospha’s work on marketplace Halo effects is a clear example. In aggregate analysis, a material 40% of Amazon revenue was influenced by non-Amazon paid media. Ignore that and you shrink the apparent value of channels that actually set demand in motion. The budget then tilts in the wrong direction, and performance decays. 

Offline exposure creates a similar blind spot. A billboard can lift branded search, direct sessions, and store traffic. Platform reports give credit to the touchpoint that appears later, often Search. The practical fix is to log the exposure and measure incrementality, then bring that evidence into MMM. When the finance team sees the incremental lift, the portfolio gets reweighted with fewer arguments and fewer surprises. 

Closing the Gap Between Brand and Business Outcomes 

Upper funnel work often struggles to speak the language of a CFO. Fospha’s collaboration with Google aims at that translation. The GLOW initiative models the causal chain from awareness inputs such as YouTube reach or sustained Demand Gen investment to leading indicators like branded search and engaged visits, then connects those signals to outcomes such as average order value. 

In testing across dozens of brands, those leading indicators predicted downstream results in a large majority of cases. That gives brand teams a way to brief finance with evidence rather than faith. It also gives planners a monitor for progress while a campaign builds. When the early signals move in the right direction, teams can defend continued spend without waiting a year for lagging results. 

Stress Tests in a Changing Landscape 

AI-driven discovery is the sharpest test. As Julie Bernard of Lily AI observed, heavy fashion and beauty shoppers increasingly begin with generative tools like Gemini or ChatGPT. An impression may now be filtered, summarized, or even produced by an agent before a human ever arrives. That creates exposures that do not log cleanly and signals that vary in quality. 

Two ideas help. First, treat these surfaces like any other source of influence and log exposure where possible. Second, apply quality thresholds so weak or non-human signals do not steer money. Google’s engaged-view conversions show how a higher bar stabilizes impression-based readouts when discovery mechanics evolve. 

Digital out-of-home fits the same logic. Use geo-controls to create clean comparison areas, hold other media steady, and track the local outcomes that matter along with the digital ones. A concise read on lift is more useful than a sprawling deck that still leaves the core question unanswered. 

The Trust Factor 

Even a strong framework fails without shared trust. The durable edge is a shared operating model that keeps everyone working to one goal and reading the same results on the same schedule. 

This is where collaboration between the advertiser, the agency, Google, and Fospha changes the conversation. Teams agree one problem statement and one measurement plan. For example, growth on new-to-brand revenue with a clear MER and CAC guardrail, read through MMM, geo-tests, and engaged-view conversions. With that agreement in place, YouTube and Demand Gen run as a single portfolio tuned to the same scoreboard.  

Klausner’s line captured the benefit. Trust is not fluff. It saves time and leads to better media investments. 

A Confidence Engine 

Measurement used to explain yesterday. The job now is to inform tomorrow. When marketers log exposures, prove incrementality, and manage brand and performance as a single portfolio with partners on the same plan, they earn the right to invest where growth begins. The finance team sees the connection to revenue. The operating teams get a faster path from signal to decision. 

Klausner’s test remains the anchor. Is your measurement

That is how measurement graduates from dashboard to confidence engine and how brands move beyond the click toward durable growth. 

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