KEY TAKEAWAYS
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Foundation First:
Paid media cannot perform effectively without a solid tracking foundation to guide budget allocation and optimization decisions. -
Two Costly Failure Modes:
Faulty tracking leads to double-counting (overinflating ROI and burning budget) or unattributed conversions (leaving spend untracked). -
Reframe the Value:
Stop trying to measure direct ROI on tracking fixes; instead, view tracking as the infrastructure that makes every other ROI metric trustworthy.
Every marketing budget round produces the same standoff. Money can go into paid media, where you can point at a return, or into fixing analytics and tracking, where you can’t. Paid media wins, and the measurement stays broken for another quarter.
John Wilkes calls tracking work “the most unglamorous, unsexy part of marketing”, and he’s watched the budget question block it repeatedly, particularly when tracking and performance come out of the same pot.
Ashleigh Rowles, senior paid media manager at Somebody Digital, thinks the sequencing is backwards. “Without a really well set up tracking foundation, your paid media is not going to work in any case,” she says.
Why Broken Tracking Costs Marketing ROI
A broken setup goes wrong in two directions, and one of them feels great while it’s happening.
Double counting is the flattering version. “Your ROI looks really good, it looks like you’re getting a really strong conversion rate,” Rowles says. “But ultimately you’re burning money. You aren’t doubling your revenue.” Decisions get made on that number, budget gets moved towards the campaigns that look strongest, and the whole thing compounds.
The inverse is the opposite version. Spend goes out, conversions don’t get attributed, and you can’t tell which campaign produced the revenue. “If you’re spending money but you aren’t tracking, how do you know what’s working?”
Her position is that a solid tracking foundation is the only thing that gives you confident direction on where the money should go, across every channel rather than paid alone.
Reframing Marketing Measurement & Analytics Value
“When it comes to fixing the analytics and the measurement and the tracking, stop trying to put an ROI on doing that. There’s no ROI on doing that. It’s giving you the ability to put ROI on other things.” John Wilkes adds.
That’s the argument to take into the budget meeting. Tracking work is the infrastructure that makes every other ROI number in the deck real, and holding it to the same test as a campaign is why so many companies are still optimizing against numbers they don’t trust.
Fixing tracking doesn’t generate revenue by itself. Instead, it builds the infrastructure required to accurately attribute conversions, understand performance across channels, and make informed budget allocation decisions across all other marketing activities.
Broken tracking leads to two major failure modes: double counting (which inflates conversion rates and ROI artificially, leading to burned budget on ineffective campaigns) or unattributed conversions (which leaves spend untracked so teams cannot determine which campaigns actually drive revenue).
Without a solid tracking foundation, paid media cannot perform effectively. Proper attribution ensures campaigns feed accurate conversion data and CRM outcomes back into bidding systems, preventing waste on low-quality leads or form fills.
Reframe tracking work as the essential infrastructure that validates every other ROI metric in the deck. Rather than holding measurement to the same immediate return expectations as paid campaigns, justify it as the foundation that makes revenue numbers real and trustworthy for executive decision-making.
