How Should CEOs Measure Marketing ROI in a Non-Linear Buyer Journey?

One early finding from ZILU’s CEO–Marketing Gap Survey is clear:

Hard to measure ROI is one of the biggest frustrations CEOs and founders have with marketing.

That frustration is understandable.

When growth expectations are high, budgets are under pressure and every function is expected to prove its value, CEOs want to know what marketing is really contributing.

But the problem is not always that marketing cannot be measured. Often, it is being measured too narrowly.

Why Marketing ROI Feels Harder to Measure Now — And What CEOs Should Look At Instead

Too many businesses still rely heavily on last-click attribution, lead volume, short-term campaign results or surface-level metrics such as impressions, open rates and traffic.

Those numbers may be useful.

But they rarely tell the whole story.

The Buyer Journey Is No Longer Linear

Customers no longer move neatly from awareness to interest to decision.

They search. Compare. Ask peers. Read articles. Watch videos. Attend events. See founder content. Review case studies. Visit websites. Leave. Return. Ask AI tools. Speak to colleagues. Then eventually someone fills in a form or books a call.

Google’s “messy middle” research describes this reality well: buyers move between exploration and evaluation repeatedly before making a decision.

In B2B, the picture is even more complex. The person who submits the enquiry may not be the only person influencing the decision. Edelman and LinkedIn’s B2B Thought Leadership research highlights the role of “hidden buyers” — internal stakeholders who shape decisions behind the scenes.

So when a dashboard gives all the credit to the final click, it may be technically correct.

But commercially misleading.

Why Last-Touch Reporting Can Distort Marketing Decisions

This is not a new problem. Marketing often needs to defend themselves, because

• Sales teams would often ask: “Which channel converts best?”
• CFOs would ask for dashboards to prove which channel worked, so budget could be moved away from the low-converting ones.

The question sounds sensible. But the answer is rarely that simple. A lead may appear to come from organic search or direct traffic. On paper, it looks like they came from nowhere.

But if you look deeper, someone from the same company may have visited your website several times. Different colleagues may have read your thought leadership, seen your paid ad, attended your event, watched your keynote, read a media interview, or checked your LinkedIn presence.

Then, at the end of that journey, a junior marketer or assistant submits the form.

If you only measure the final touchpoint, you may assume the form-fill source created the demand.

It did not. It captured it. That distinction matters.

Because if budget decisions are made purely from last-touch data, the business may cut the very activity that created trust in the first place and consider the junior assistant the most important persona to target.

The Danger of Over-Correcting to Short-Term Performance

Short-term performance marketing has a role. It can help capture demand, test messaging and generate measurable response. But performance marketing works better when brand, trust and market visibility already exist.

Without that foundation, paid channels can become more expensive. CPC and CPA can rise. Conversion can weaken. Buyers may click but not trust. They may visit but not convert.

Nike offers a useful cautionary example.

In 2024, Nike openly shifted dollars from performance marketing back into brand marketing as part of its turnaround plan. CEO Elliott Hill said Nike was starting to move spend from performance to brand, after a period of falling revenues and pressure on its direct digital business.

Nike is a much larger business than most start-ups or scale-ups, but the lesson is still relevant.

If a business only chases the most measurable short-term activity, it can weaken the brand signals that make performance channels work in the first place.

AI Is Changing Discovery Again

The measurement challenge is now becoming more complex because AI is changing how people search and validate information.

Google has said AI in Search is creating new ways for people to ask questions and discover brands through AI Overviews and AI Mode. This means

Buyers may form an opinion before they ever click through to your website.

They may ask AI tools to compare providers, explain a category, summarise options or recommend what to consider. Google’s own AI Overviews also summarise information from multiple sources directly on the search results page.

For CEOs, this creates a new marketing question:

Is our brand visible, credible and accurately represented in the places where buyers now validate decisions?

Traditional SEO, paid search and web analytics still matter. But they are no longer enough on their own.

Vanity Metrics Can Mislead. So Can Short-Term Metrics.

It is easy to criticise vanity metrics. Likes, impressions, open rates and website traffic are not business outcomes.

However, short-term conversion metrics can also mislead when they are treated as the whole truth.

• A post with high engagement may not create pipeline.
• A paid campaign with many leads may create poor-fit opportunities.
• A webinar may not convert immediately, but it may influence a buying committee months later.
• A founder article may not generate a form fill, but it may help a prospect trust the business before a sales conversation.

We now have to measure ROI and marketing impacts more intelligently.

What CEOs Should Measure Instead

If marketing impact is no longer linear, marketing measurement cannot stay linear either.

A stronger model looks at three layers.

1. Commercial outcomes

Measure the metrics the CEO ultimately cares about: qualified pipeline, revenue contribution, customer acquisition cost or customer lifetime value. Marketing should eventually connect to commercial progress. But these numbers alone do not always explain how demand was created.

2. Marketing performance

Measure whether marketing activity is moving the right audience in the right direction. Move the conversation from “how many leads?” to “are we creating the right opportunities?”

3. Trust, demand and visibility signals

In a multi-touch, AI-influenced world, these metrics are becoming more important:

Trust, Demand and Visibility signals in AI world

These metrics do not always produce an immediate sale. But they help show whether the market is starting to recognise, trust and seek out the business.

10 Things CEOs Should Change in Marketing Measurement

1. Stop treating last-click attribution as the full truth: It shows the final visible touchpoint, not the full journey that created trust and intent.
2. Separate demand creation from demand capture: Paid search, forms and demos often capture demand. Brand, content, PR, events and thought leadership often help create it. Both matter.
3. Measure lead quality, not just lead volume: A high number of weak leads can make marketing look busy while wasting sales time.
4. Track account-level behaviour: In B2B, several people from the same company may engage before anyone raises their hand. Do not only look at the individual who submits the form.
5. Measure assisted touchpoints: Content, events, webinars, founder posts and PR may not be the final click, but they may influence the decision.
6. Use experiments, not just dashboards: Dashboards show what happened. Experiments help explain why.
7. Track branded search and direct demand: If more people are searching for your brand or coming directly to your website, marketing may be building memory and trust.
8. Monitor AI and search visibility: Ask whether your brand appears in AI-generated answers, comparison searches and category conversations.
9. Audit credibility signals: Buyers look for proof. So do AI systems. Case studies, reviews, media mentions, partner pages, expert content and founder visibility all matter.
10. Match the metric to the time horizon: Some activity should be judged weekly. Some monthly. Some quarterly. Some over six to twelve months. Do not judge long-term trust-building with short-term conversion logic.

The CEO Takeaway

Marketing should be accountable for the full journey.

Do not ask “which channel converted?”, as answer may lead business end up optimising for the final click and ignoring the work that created the buyer’s confidence.

The better question is: Is marketing building trust, demand, visibility, pipeline quality and commercial momentum over time?

That will lead to a more useful conversation. The one CEOs and marketing leaders need to have in today’s marketing when the buying journey, is never linear.

Still not sure what this means for your business?

Talk to us.

ZILU helps founders and growth businesses make sense of marketing ROI, focus on the right metrics, and turn marketing activity into commercial momentum.