Half way through 2026 and I having been sat in several QBR conversation recently, I thought it useful to sum up my thoughts on the most important measurement tools businesses are (or should be!) considering. The ‘messy middle’ is looking messier than ever in a time where creative is coming to the forefront of everything we do, so how can we tie multi-platform, top, middle and bottom funnel activity and creative insights to have a true picture of understanding? Let’s get into it:
1.Dedicated measurement platforms
A favourite phrase of ours at HOP is ‘single source of truth’ and given data is the be and end all for anyone who cares about performance marketing, it’s pretty important! Every ad platform is inherently set up to be selfish and will all take credit for sales, or activity which means overlapping claimed conversions and a distorted view of what's actually driving revenue. This is where third-party attribution tools earn their keep. Platforms like Triple Whale pull first-party data, order data and platform metrics into one place, giving you a channel-neutral view of what's really working rather than relying on each platform's own pixel and its own definition of a conversion. Particularly for a long sales cycle, I’ve found this incredibly helpful.
Multi-touch models show you how channels work together across the journey, rather than handing 100% of the credit to whichever touchpoint happened last. We can then take this a step further to truly understand incrementality testing.
If you aren’t sure on your 1 source of truth and you’re running at scale, I would definitely start your measurement journey here.
2. Proving the upper funnel is working through branded search
Challenge number 2 – you're running any kind of activity that isn’t bottom of funnel – how do you know it’s working? Previously you might have been limited to brand lift studies or uplift studies which come with a heavy price tag and minimal insights.
Google’s new attributed brand searches feature is changing the game on understanding uplift from these types of activity. At the time of writing this is in Beta but being rolled out if you ask for me (worked for me!). It allows us to see how much branded search activity is being generated by demand gen and video campaigns directly from those campaigns. Whereas before we might be looking at our brand search campaign intently for any kind of increase, we can now see exactly which campaigns are generating the demand.
3. Measuring what's actually working, creatively
As targeting and bidding get handed more and more to automation, across PMax, Advantage+ and Demand Gen, creative is fast becoming the only genuine lever left for finding your audience on search and social. The algorithm decides who sees an ad; the creative decides whether it lands.
We want to know more than the platforms are able to tell us and at HOP we’ve been exploring different tools available to us.
What you should be looking for is a tool that surfaces which assets, hooks, formats and messaging angles are actually driving performance rather than just which ads are getting delivery. One of the best ways to do this is through tagging the creative, or having detailed naming conventions. The aim being that you can then scale what is working.
Don’t rule out platforms that let you take these learning and iterate creative off the back of them too, they may be more expensive but undoubtedly this is the quickest way to learn.
4. Knowing where to start.
Knowing where to start I often find can be the hardest thing to do, everyone has ideas, every team has suggestions but how can you bring these together and prioritise those which are going to have the best business impact?
We’ve developed a RICE scoring system for testing and learning which takes the bias out of all of this.
It takes into account Reach, Expected Impact, Confidence and effort to give you an overall score. Looking at the list of scores allows us as marketers to work out our priorities and allows us to focus on moving the needle.
The scores for each category are chosen based of a number scale that’s clearly defined, to remove as much ‘guesswork’ from the process as possible.
Get in touch if you’d like access to the full spreadsheet!
