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:
Reach - How many people saw the asset, walked past the booth, opened the email.
Engagement - Did they click, download, attend, or share?
Cost - What did you spend to create, promote, or sponsor it?
Direct outcomes - Leads, signups, demos, sales calls.
These are the inputs you can benchmark, compare, and optimise. They give you enough data to see whether a channel is healthy, whether a partner is pulling their weight, and whether the creative actually landed.
Ignore them, and you’re just throwing money into the void. But treat them as the whole story, and you’ll miss the wider impact.
Secondary and Tertiary Effects
The most valuable outcomes of marketing aren’t always direct. They’re the knock-on effects; the halo you build around your brand:
Secondary effects: The people who don’t buy now, but start following you, sign up for the newsletter, or mention you to a colleague.
Tertiary effects: The reputational lift. The compound effect of showing up consistently in the right places. The partner who brings you into a deal three months later because you’ve been visible together.
None of these fit neatly into a dashboard. But they’re real. And if you ignore them, you’ll underinvest in the exact activities that make your marketing compound over time.
Bake It Into the Margins
This is where agencies and tech companies need a shift in mindset.
If you price your work, or plan your marketing, as if every activity must be justified by clean attribution, you’ll always feel like you’re “losing money” on the harder-to-measure channels.
The fix isn’t more tools. It’s margin. You build in the space, financially and strategically, for those secondary and tertiary effects.
You know the podcast won’t deliver immediate SQLs, but you treat it as a brand-building expense that compounds over the next 12 months.
You accept that event sponsorships are about relationships first, and you budget for them with that lens.
You factor in that some content will be evergreen infrastructure, not campaign ROI.
By planning for the unmeasurable, you stop treating it as waste, and start treating it as investment.
The Agency + Tech Context
The reality is: most of the deals that move the needle for agencies and SaaS companies don’t come from clicking a Facebook ad. They come from the accumulation of impressions, touchpoints, and borrowed credibility through partnerships.
The agency that sponsors an industry event may not get a direct lead, but when they pitch next month, the prospect has already “seen them around.”
The SaaS company that partners on a whitepaper may not see a spike in demos, but when they launch a new feature, the distribution network is already primed.
These are second-order returns. And they’re the difference between short-term lead gen and long-term growth.
The Takeaway
You can’t measure everything. But you should measure what you can.
The rest, the secondary and tertiary effects, need to be acknowledged, budgeted for, and built into your margins.
If you don’t, you’ll starve the activities that actually make you memorable. And no dashboard will save you from being forgettable.