• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, Yesterday

Email marketers may not be worried about this since their medium is built on direct response, but they probably should be. A new study by the data firm TransUnion, created with eMarketer, found that measurement confidence is declining.  

Of the marketers polled, 14% say their faith has declined. And 60.2% add that their metrics are being challenged by internal stakeholders, particularly non-marketing ones. Moreover, 28.6% have had from 11% to 20% of their budget reallocated or put at risk because of measurement doubts. 

As a result, 50% of marketers are turning to artificial intelligence and machine learning to automate reporting.  

Those doubts are being driven by: 

• Siloed or incomplete data—49.5% 
• Cross-channel deduplication challenges—48% 
• Walled-garden reporting limitaitons—40.8% 
• Limited availability of third-party cookies/device IDs—25.5%
• Lack of internal expertise—21.9% 
• Model bias or black-box methodologies—21.4% 
• Other—1.7%
• None of the above—5.1% 

In addition, marketers have set these priorities for the next 12 months: 

1. Aligning marketing metrics to business outcomes—66.3%
2. Improving cross-channel attribution accuracy—55.1% 
3. Reducing time to insight—36.2% 
4. Expanding incrementality testing—27.6% 
5. Incorporating retail media networks into unified measurement—18.9% 
6. Less reliance on third-party cookies—13.35 
7. Other—2.6%

With 26.5% dissatisfied with their measurement tech stack, marketers are turning to long-term holistic strategies such as marketing mix modeling and multitouch attribution.  

TransUnion and eMarketer surveyed 196 U.S. marketers.