April 21, 2025

How To Measure Your Marketing Efforts (And Why Click Attribution Is Dead)

54 minutes

#239: Measurement | In this Exit Five live session, Dave sits down with Pranav Piyush, Co-Founder & CEO of Paramark (ex-PayPal, Dropbox, Adobe, BILL), to talk about the future of B2B marketing measurement.

Spoiler alert: it’s not clicks.

They break down why the old way of doing attribution doesn’t cut it anymore and why leading B2B teams are shifting toward incrementality, experimentation, and marketing mix modeling.

Dave and Pranav also cover:

The gaps in the old way of doing attribution
What the best B2B marketing teams are doing now for attribution
The key questions CMOs face from boards and execs about measurement
Three things you can do this quarter to improve your measurement

Timestamps

(00:00) - – Intro to Pranav

(04:33) - – The Purple Cow mindset: why differentiation matters more than ever

(06:13) - – Pranav’s background (PayPal, Dropbox, Adobe, BILL → Paramark)

(07:18) - – “Measurement is Robin. Creative is Batman.”

(08:33) - – Why click/touch attribution is flawed and misleading

(12:03) - – The 95/5 rule: most of your audience isn’t in-market…yet

(14:48) - – How top brands (Asana, DoorDash, P&G) measure beyond attribution

(16:13) - – What is incrementality and why it’s more useful than attribution

(18:33) - – Why revenue isn’t always the right KPI - especially in long sales cycles

(20:33) - – Intro to marketing mix modeling (MMM) and how it works

(22:33) - – Visualizing baseline vs. incremental impact on pipeline

(23:48) - – Geo testing: how to prove a channel’s impact without attribution tools

(25:48) - – The branded search trap: why you should test turning it off

(28:18) - – Even Meta, Google, LinkedIn admit attribution is flawed

(29:03) - – How to measure untrackable stuff (organic, content, social)

(32:33) - – Why “credit” kills performance

(34:23) - – Measurement for startups

(37:18) - – What to do if all you track is closed-won revenue

(39:03) - – Why attribution software is overkill under $100K in spend

(40:18) - – Should you ask “How did you hear about us?”

(43:03) - – How to carve out budget for channel testing

(45:43) - – Don’t skip audience research

(49:03) - – Creativity is still your #1 growth lever (measurement just supports it)

(50:33) - – Wrap-up and final takeaways

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***

Today’s episode is brought to you by Grammarly.

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***

Thanks to my friends at hatch.fm for producing this episode and handling all of the Exit Five podcast production.

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By Dave Gerhardt

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