An Honest Conversation About Marketing ROI

Marketing ROI is the metric everyone asks for and almost nobody calculates honestly. The board wants a number. The CMO provides one. And the gap between what that number represents and what actually happened is where millions of pounds disappear without anyone noticing.

This is not an indictment of marketing teams. It is a structural problem with how the industry approaches measurement, and solving it requires honesty that most organisations find uncomfortable.

Why Most ROI Reporting Is Misleading

The standard marketing ROI calculation is deceptively simple: revenue attributed to marketing divided by marketing spend. The problem is in the word "attributed."

Modern attribution models, whether last-touch, first-touch, multi-touch, or algorithmic, all share a fundamental limitation: they assign credit based on observable digital touchpoints and miss everything that happens between them. The colleague who mentioned your brand in a meeting. The podcast interview the CEO heard on a commute. The industry report that named you as a leader. None of these appear in your attribution model, yet all of them influenced the buying decision.

The result is a system that gives precise-looking numbers while systematically misrepresenting how buyers actually make decisions. This is not a minor measurement error. In B2B contexts, where buying cycles span months and involve multiple stakeholders, attribution models routinely mis-assign 40% to 60% of credit.

Attribution Theatre

We use the term "attribution theatre" to describe the organisational performance that surrounds ROI reporting. It looks like this:

• The paid media team claims credit for conversions that would have happened organically, because the last click was an ad for a branded search term the buyer was already searching for.
• The content team cannot prove their blog posts drive revenue, even though sales conversations consistently reference them, because the touchpoints do not appear in the CRM.
• The organic team shows traffic growth but cannot connect it to pipeline, because the attribution model privileges the channels with cleaner tracking.
• The board sees a dashboard that shows each channel delivering positive ROI, but total revenue has not increased proportionally. The numbers add up to more than 100% because every channel is claiming shared credit.

This is not a technology problem. Better tools will not fix it. It is a honesty problem, and it requires a different approach to the conversation.

What Boards Should Actually Ask

The question "What is our marketing ROI?" is the wrong question. It invites a precise-sounding answer to an imprecise problem. Better questions include:

• "What would happen to our pipeline if we stopped all marketing activity for 90 days?" This forces an honest assessment of marketing's actual contribution versus its attributed contribution.
• "Which marketing activities are we most and least confident actually drive revenue?" This invites a candid conversation about certainty ranges rather than point estimates.
• "What is our customer acquisition cost by channel, and how has it trended over 24 months?" Trends tell you more than snapshots. Rising CAC across paid channels while organic CAC remains stable signals something important.
• "How much of our pipeline originates from buyers who first found us through unpaid channels?" This separates demand generation from demand capture, a distinction most attribution models collapse.
• "What is our brand awareness in our target market, and how has it changed?" Brand is the unmeasured multiplier that makes every other channel more effective. Ignoring it because it is hard to measure does not make it less important.

An Honest Metrics Framework

At EIGEMY, we advocate for a measurement approach built on honesty ranges rather than false precision. Here is the framework we use with clients.

Tier 1: High Confidence Metrics. These can be reliably measured and directly tied to revenue. They include marketing-sourced pipeline (opportunities where marketing was the first known touch), marketing-influenced pipeline (opportunities where marketing played a documented role), and direct conversion metrics from owned channels.

Tier 2: Moderate Confidence Metrics. These indicate health but require interpretation. They include organic traffic growth to commercial pages, search visibility for high-intent keywords, email engagement rates from marketing-generated contacts, and content engagement metrics from known prospects.

Tier 3: Directional Indicators. These cannot be precisely tied to revenue but indicate strategic progress. They include brand search volume trends, share of voice in AI answer engines, organic visibility compounding rates, and industry authority signals such as backlink growth and citation frequency.

The critical discipline is presenting each tier with its appropriate confidence level. Tier 1 metrics go on the board slide with numbers. Tier 2 metrics go with ranges and trend arrows. Tier 3 metrics go with narrative context, not numbers.

The Gap Between Activity and Outcome

The most dangerous pattern in marketing ROI is confusing activity with outcome. Publishing 50 blog posts is an activity. Generating 200 marketing-qualified leads is an activity. Even driving 10,000 organic visits per month is, strictly speaking, an activity. The outcome is revenue, and the distance between activity and revenue is where most marketing measurement fails.

This gap exists because marketing's impact is often indirect and delayed. A piece of content published today may generate its first attributable revenue 18 months from now when a prospect who read it enters the sales cycle. The ROI calculation at month 3 shows that content as a cost with zero return. The true ROI will not be visible for years.

This is particularly relevant for organic and SEO investment, which operates on longer time horizons than paid channels. The board that demands quarterly ROI from an organic programme is asking the wrong question at the wrong cadence.

What Honest ROI Reporting Looks Like

Honest reporting acknowledges uncertainty. It presents ranges, not point estimates. It separates what can be measured with confidence from what requires inference. And it gives the board the context to make strategic decisions rather than false comfort through fabricated precision.

A well-constructed marketing report to the board should include:

• Marketing-sourced pipeline and revenue with clear methodology notes
• Customer acquisition cost trends by channel, with honest confidence ranges
• A candid assessment of which investments are working, which are uncertain, and which should be cut
• Leading indicators that suggest future performance, clearly labelled as directional
• A clear statement of what cannot be measured and why

This approach will initially feel uncomfortable. It lacks the clean simplicity of a single ROI number. But it provides something far more valuable: a foundation for sound strategic decisions. The board that understands the honest picture makes better allocation decisions than the board that believes a misleading one.

If your current marketing reporting feels precise but unconvincing, or if the numbers look good but the business impact feels absent, senior marketing leadership that can bridge the gap between measurement and reality is likely what your organisation needs.