VERBATIMS

What are the key obstacles to measuring marketing's
ROI in the categories in which you compete?
Variable accountability - accuarate knowledge of the causal relationship on incremental activity
getting granular enough data; setting up testing to measure against controls;
Freezing all other activities in the marketplace to be able to measure this 1 activity
Not receiving the sales data from the client or retailer on a timely basis, or in a format that is easy to translate.
For any product category it depends upon the method of "promotion/advertising".
The unmeasurable aspects such as brand building, repeat buys, PR, etc.
General Market ad presence (for Hispanic advertisng)
Knowing which element of the Marketing Mix that influenced sales
Isolating the marketing variables from the uncontrollable variables. Having enough marketing spending on a effort to be impactful to sales and measurable.
long sales cycle
Top-of-mind awareness because-not all consumers are ready to buy the moment of communication.
no ablity to consistantly identify the prospect the take action based on out door ads
Search engine results and effectiveness - is the message getting out there to the correct audience? And how high are we ranking on the various search engines since all of their "criteria" for listing is different.
Limited budget dollars and resources, lack of industry standards/approaches on how to measure or no way to build measurement in
ANALYZING data. Generating data is easy, but making it available for analysis and insight seems to be a problem
unable to capture information at the POS
information, feedback from retailers
cost time
cost for consumer feedback - are they buying our product because it is on the retailer's shelves or are they buying our product because they want our brand, are they buying our product due to certain types of information we provide, advertising, promotions, some other "something or other" we are doing??

Accurate sales data
data overload
Cost
A clear methodology linking the ad spend to the in-store results.
determining what sales can be attributed to marketing, and what to personal selling.
sales force takes credit for developing the lead
The nature of our business is that we use direct mail to find interested business prospects who are then visited by a sales person. That's great in that it works for us, but it also means we get little direct feedback from prospects (other than a response for more information), so we can't measure how effective our marketing materials are in comparison/contrast to our sales people.
Ability to focus on consumer results instead of market results
Multiple events make it difficult to isolate the contributions of single efforts.
no body covers the business of entertainment marketing and promtions. Relationship between sell-thru and promotional efforts not tracked
Costs Information on different suppliers
accuracy of consumer response
Measuring in-store media is difficult and there are not a lot of avenues available to do it.
Understanding true goals and then measuring against those goals
without tangible metrics tied to sales, we struggle with open/click through rates as measures of success/failure.
Seasonality, Economy, Weather, trends
Lack of data
basic behavioural tracking (purchasing, influence) linked to controlled messaging
How to measure what specific marketing activity(ies) triggered the actual purchase behavior.
it's difficult to identify what % of sales can be attributed to a particular promotion. What really was driving sales?
Clients want measurable results but don't necessarily want to spend money to get them. For instance, many clients want to 'raise awareness' but aren't prepared to spend the money to actually measure such a thing reliably.
Getting the will (internally) to do it. Also political issues -- some people/departments have a vested interest in NOT measuring.

too many factors and interrelationships
multiple locations
How many people reviewed POS materials, how many were offered specific after-market products.
Insufficient data, insufficient resources, low managment support for putting system in place.
long sales cycle to to contractural relationships
staffing to handle the tally and paper
Incremental customer value Multi-channel complexities
Short term ROI vs. Long term ROI
the long term nature of nurture
Management's failure to recognize the need
Things out of your control like distribution
costs in obtaining the right data for measurement, inaccurate data, time/lack of resources
always focused on a direct tie back to specific tactic
reliable correlation between dollars spent and sales generated
Availability of data Inconsistency of mix in different markets due to Field Sales programs
Feedback from field sales on the outcome of the leads provided.
there are too many barriers erected, based on self interest, that get in the way of determining the total impacts.
branding
Taking into account and singling all the external variables that could " pollute " the analysis ... or complement it.
Industry cycles are very long
Time and availability of information
I have to create a spreadsheet to track and measure what we do for promotion. There's no relation to project or to customer and project. I really don't know how to create what would be a simple and useful analysis tool.

No precise or way to prove metrics related to marketing, other than DM.
Not being able to extrapolate advertising from other elements of the marketing mix that impact sales -- such as, distribtution outs, consumer purchase cycles, product quality issues.
Our Database
No Neilsen data in many categories
Controlling other variables (true for all categories)
There are too many outside factors that can contribute to the success or failure of a marketing effort. In addition, there is usually not sufficient research available to measure before and after results.
good information, sysndicated data for my industry
Typically it takes several different types of activities to raise awareness to the point that the sales rep is able to level company name recognition to get a meeting. It could be any combination of PR, ads, dm, etc. and hard to know what finally sinks in with a potential customer. The key is repeat exposure. The key obstacle is that it is rarely "one" thing we can attribute to a sale.
availability of the results on competitors' marketing programs
Too many factors and variables that 'blur' the results
lack of a consistent methodology
unsufficient contact with clients, disturbance & obstacles in communication channels
No money to make a trecking research of the brand image. A loto of different variables (disciplines of communication) make the same results
Lacking ability to track media effects.
lack of data, lack of access to data
Effect of seasonality affects analysis of ROI
Lack og management commitmet to measurement
huge data gaps of all kinds, accuracy, timeliness, coverage, specific level, etc.
We can do it. Most other medai cannot
Not enough systems support to track consumers behavior over time
Ineffective/inadequate tracking by the client.
lack of reliable data

Some of the key obstacles to measuring marketingís ROI is in the collecting and sharing of information as well as understanding all the competitive activity that was happening at the same time.
unwillingness of sales org to cooperate fear of measurement
inconsistent client plans and follow through
Too many initiatives going on, lack of clarity around events actually driving change.
Our own savvy: do we really understand what the customers want / don't want when voting with their dollars? How do we innovate to surprise them - going beyond rear-view mirror marketing?
Too small a market section right to accurately gauge the effects of our product line. Need more data
Getting all the data in one place
Validating price of event without any quantitative support
One of the key obstacles in measuring the ROI is that most clients do not take into account the lifetime value of a customer. Marketing is advertising, period. To try and add a dollar value to every campaign you run is ridiculous. I have worked for major corporations and ad agencies. It is unrealistic to expect that every campaign you run, (online, offline, where ever) is going to give you an immediate return on your investment. Advertisers need to realize that advertising delivers people to your door. After that, it is entirely in their hands to convert the person and keep the person. In the past week, just by going out to eat or shopping or to a movie, I have seen 10 examples of horrible customer service. Advertisers need to look within their company and see how prospects and customers are being treated. My aunt, who lives in a small town in middle America, was parially responsible for closing a major discount department store. She went into the store to purchase an item. It did not have the proper barcode on it. She was told by the cashier to go back into the store and pick up the same item. Where was the customer service? No where to be found. My aunt told everyone she knew about her encounter. People stopped shopping there and the store closed within three months of the encounter. What could the store have done? Addresses the complaint, addresses her concern. Instead they ignored it. Customer service is the key. People will stop shopping at stores with poor customer service.
lack of information inadequate budgets
Reliable results are always late.
Factoring in complimentary items.
Programs usually back into each other--so the time needed to secure the data and provide thoughtful analysis of the results is not always available.
marketing register systems
no direct correlation btwn ads and sales
Retail participation/Data sharing
Inability to use traditional comparative tactics (control groups, etc.) or to fully isolate/identify other influences to measure incremental behavior.
Ensuring that all parties agree to measurement of same deliverables and to agreement of up front cost structures
the disconnect between (raw) data gathering and translating it into useful information; also inconsistent data leaving apples and oranges situations
Difficult to isolate the variables and which has had the most impact. There is not a scientific enviornment to have a control and a test group. In the business I'm in, apparel retail - if sales are great it must be the product, if they suck, it must be the marketing.
Overwhelmed with data -- not enough analysis
none

Figuring out the impact of our advertising and direct mail campaigns. Unlike with products, professional services tend to be relationship-based sales with a longer sales cycle. Because of the long sales cycle, it's difficult to measure the ROI on our marketing efforts. Also, getting our sales people to track the sources of new leads is a challenge. Without their support, it can be near impossible to measure our impact.
Our stores are individually owned and our retailers do some of their own marketing
too many influence factors
Timing -- marketing activies often influence sales far beyond the time period selected for measuring the results.
As marketing tactics are integrated, it becomes more difficult to measure the effectiveness of individual tactics.
Funding to develop models
having agreed upon metrics on how to evaluate marketing programs; being able to explicitly link advertsing to revenue results
Achieving the greatest marketing power often requires applying multiple tactics, thus difficult to isolate which tactics or combination of tactics spurred the transaction. Taking the consumer from awareness to transaction usually requires a complex set of factors which must work together. And, so many variables -- if the advertising didn't work was it because it was too weak a media buy? The wrong media buy? Creative that wasn't compelling?
impossibility to get reliable results of selling out
Service vs. product
seasonal and economic
What overhead is to be included.
1. Actual sell-through data. 2. Segmenting activites / attributing appropriate results to each.
- results of marketing activity may not come in until 6 - 12 months after the program.
a clients willingness to pay for the measurement
tough to determine which tactic results in the sale - did they see it on TV, hear on radio, see in newspaper? Might be able to know which yielded in the sale, but what impact did the others have in priming this response for sale?
lack of data
Inadequate skill economies to evaluate performance competently.

Connecting the result to the marketing of a great loan rate versus the rate itself. Determining marketing's contribution to the result in business improvement.
Not enough data available
data
Too many variables to compensate for advertising investement.
sufficiently large control cells
Difficult to measure all the expenditures for each channel including Point of Sale, Measured Media, On Line, professional sales, and Catalog. The way product reaches the market and the expensese that are exclusive and those that are all inclusive make accurate measurement difficult.
Effect of sampling and promotion.
Isolating incremental volume driven by promotion, making appropriate assumptions regarding the time-horrizon of promotion impact, the present value of each impression/trial etc, the "intangible" value of advertising
Isolating the effect of the key variables
1) Isolating the impact of the promotion only effort against other marketing variables 2) Getting access to detailed sales data and p&l info
funds don't allow surveys, and responses to advertising entail traffic to dealers, dealers are not quick to keep tally on where one got call-to-action
difficult to specifically itemize what medium is affecting results
There are too many factors which influence the marketplace over which you have no control.
Most marketing features very small parts of the overall experience...
Getting the client to budget adequately for the right kind of tracking/ ROI analysis.
Getting the client to budget adequately for the right kind of tracking/ ROI analysis.
Data availability, long sales cycle makes it difficult to track what factors contributed to sale, running multiple advertising/direct mail campaigns concurrently

Bad advance planning for measurement. Bad follow-through on measurement.
Budgets are too tight to allow for proper pre-testing and post-measurement of marketing initiatives.
Management commitment to spend the money for objective data-gathering.
Isolating marketing initiatives.
Our primary obstacle is our Clients reluctance to learn what really happened. They frequently want to know that all went well even if the measurement tools are flawed.
Sell through data
clients not tracking responses
Selling financial services products exclusively through an agent force can make it difficult to track advertising effectiveness in terms of a direct impact on sales.
Level of data available and the abilty to get the right metrics in a timely matter.
Siloed data capture systems at clients, that don't interact.
Timeliness of getting the data in order to make decisions quicker and faster. GRP data takes too long to obtain and can impact the timing of decision making.
Multiple communications vehicles
Lead time to decision making
poor systems.
How to accurately measure every point of interaction that consumers have with brands. How to measure word of mouth.
Measuring the impact of each promotional activity (adv., pr, publicity, POS, etc.) on total brand image, brand loyalty, short term & long term revenues, intention to buy.
accurate tools to measure

The viewing of an ad, but not clicking through yet going back and purchasing either URL direct or an offline purchase.
Agreed measurement protocol
A "unified" strategically developed plan and supporting marketing data base.
Success in the engineering business is based on long term, profitable relationships with individual engineers. Hard to measure their efforts at business development. Sales are large and complex.
Difficulty separating affects of marketing activities from those of economic and technology shifts.
distinguishing between long-term, repeat buyers/customers and one-time buyers. If a marketing program runs for 1 month and we get a 30% ROI, if that came from one-time buyers that's actually more expensive to us than if that came from long-term customers - making the ROI actually either higher or lower.
there are few case studies for modeling