What Happens When You Actually Measure Marketing ROI Correctly

Most marketing teams measure the wrong things and then wonder why leadership doesn’t value their work. Taylor Thomson has spent years fixing this problem.

“If you figure out the attribution question wholly, you’re good,” Thomson says, laughing because everyone in marketing knows attribution is essentially unsolvable. Was it the first touchpoint that mattered? The last one before conversion? Some weighted combination of every interaction? Different models produce radically different answers.

This ambiguity lets marketing teams claim credit for outcomes they may not have influenced. A prospect who was going to buy anyway gets attributed to whichever campaign last touched them before converting. Marketing declares victory. Finance sees budget spent on someone who likely would have bought regardless.

Thomson, who leads revenue operations at WITHIN, advocates for a different approach: looking at overall business metrics rather than trying to attribute specific outcomes to specific activities. Did pipeline quality improve after implementing new marketing initiatives? That’s a better question than assigning precise credit to individual campaigns. His revenue operations methodology emphasizes system-level thinking over point-solution attribution.

“At the end of the day, the revenue org is there to make the company money,” Thomson notes. “If what we’re all doing isn’t aligned to drive revenue, then we’re all kind of wasting our time.”

This perspective comes from someone who understands both sides. Thomson has worked in business development, sales, and finance roles. He’s reported to heads of marketing and heads of sales at previous companies. This gives him credibility when challenging conventional measurement approaches.

At WITHIN, Thomson manages company-wide P&L reporting and develops forecasting strategies that connect marketing spend to business outcomes across longer time horizons. The work involves building dashboards that multiple teams actually use rather than reports that executives ignore. Taylor Thomson’s position at the Denver agency requires bridging functional silos that most organizations keep separate.

One area receiving particular focus: client satisfaction measurement. WITHIN achieves over 50% quarterly response rates on satisfaction surveys—unusually high for B2B contexts. The company uses AI to analyze open-ended responses at scale, identifying patterns that inform both client success and marketing strategies.

This creates a different feedback loop than typical marketing analytics. Instead of measuring only acquisition metrics, WITHIN tracks how marketing positioning aligns with client experience. When clients report confusion about service offerings during onboarding, that signals messaging problems upstream.

Thomson also challenges the typical six-month measurement window for marketing ROI. “You need six months, nine months maybe, depending on your sales cycle,” he explains. “You might not actually ever see a direct one-to-one correlation to your revenue until a year.” This longer time horizon requires different financial planning than quarterly performance reviews allow. His insights on this challenge have been featured in discussions about how finance leaders should evaluate marketing investments.

The solution isn’t better attribution modeling—it’s accepting that precise attribution is impossible and focusing instead on whether the overall commercial engine is improving. Are pipeline quality, conversion rates, and client satisfaction all trending positively? Then marketing is probably working, even if you can’t prove which specific campaigns deserve credit.

For marketing leaders frustrated by attribution debates, Thomson’s advice is pragmatic: stop trying to prove ROI for every campaign and start demonstrating that the system as a whole is performing better. That requires different conversations with finance—conversations about methodology and trend lines rather than campaign-specific metrics. Taylor Thomson’s documented approach to revenue operations provides a framework for how these discussions should work.