In agency and tech circles, “measurement” has become both a mantra and a trap. Every dashboard promises perfect clarity. Every attribution tool tells you it can close the loop. Every board deck gets stuffed with charts that suggest marketing is a clean, linear funnel.
But here’s the uncomfortable truth: you can’t measure everything. Not in partnerships. Not in marketing. Not in growth.
And if you try to? You’ll either kill the experiments that make you memorable, or pretend the numbers tell you something they don’t.
The smarter approach isn’t to abandon measurement, but to reframe it: measure what you can, accept what you can’t, and bake the rest into your margins.
The Illusion of Perfect Attribution
Agencies and SaaS platforms alike fall into the same trap: chasing precision.
You run a co-marketing campaign with a partner and expect the UTM tags to tell the full story.
You sponsor an event and want to tie every new lead back to the booth.
You host a webinar and expect that the attendee list is a reliable proxy for revenue.
But attribution has blind spots. People don’t buy because of one touch. They buy because of a sequence: hearing your name at an event, then seeing you on a podcast, then recognising your logo on a partner’s deck. By the time they book a call, the “last click” gets all the credit while the real drivers get forgotten.
If you optimise purely for what shows up in HubSpot, you’ll cut spend on the things that build trust, awareness, and credibility; the exact things that keep you in the game.
What You Can Measure
That doesn’t mean flying blind. Some things are measurable, and they matter: