Despite the sophistication of today’s media plans, measurement systems often lag behind. Budgets stretch across CTV, social, retail media, and everything in between, with teams executing omnichannel strategies with precision. But when it comes time to assess performance, most are still toggling between siloed dashboards and stitched-together reports, hoping for a coherent story that rarely surfaces.
What’s holding them back? Fragmentation is one issue. Walled gardens are another. But the bigger problem is structural: a reliance on channel-specific metrics and inconsistent methodologies that weren’t built to answer modern marketing questions. Was the campaign effective? Which channels worked hardest? Did it drive brand lift and business outcomes? Most can’t say with confidence.
In fact, DISQO’s joint study with AdExchanger reveals that fewer than one in three advertisers are very confident in the accuracy of their measurement and reporting efforts. And even fewer can demonstrate ROI on the majority of their campaigns. The rest are left guessing.
In this blog, we’ll break down the structural issues holding measurement back and explore more scalable options for getting a clear, objective view of advertising performance across the entire media ecosystem.
It’s not just that measurement is fragmented; much of it is intentionally kept that way. Walled gardens like social platforms, retail media networks, and some CTV environments have built empires on proprietary data. They offer performance metrics, but only within their ecosystems, using their methodologies, often without visibility into what happens before or after exposure. Advertisers get a version of the truth, but rarely all of it.
This lack of transparency isn’t a flaw. It’s the business model. So while these platforms offer scale and targeting, they come with a fundamental tradeoff: the inability to measure consistently across environments. You can see how your ads performed on the platform, but not how they moved consumers across the broader journey. Or how they influenced search, site visits, or purchases elsewhere in addition to how they compare to other channels.
This is more than an inconvenience, it’s a strategic liability. In DISQO’s joint study with AdExchanger, 41% of advertisers cited siloed platforms as one of their biggest programmatic measurement challenges, second only to the broader issue of metric consolidation across channels. Nearly 40% are seriously concerned about walled gardens limiting their ability to measure accurately. Only 6% said they weren’t concerned at all.
When each platform grades its own homework, marketers are left trying to reconcile conflicting KPIs, partial results, and incomplete attribution. It creates a dangerous illusion of control, where decisions are made confidently but without clarity.
The solution isn’t more dashboards. It’s unified measurement that works outside the walls, connecting exposure to action across every platform and channel. When measurement starts and ends within the same silo, it’s not measurement—it’s marketing theater.
Modern marketing isn't linear. It’s dynamic, multi-threaded, and constantly in motion. Audiences aren’t waiting for you to guide them through a funnel—they’re jumping across devices, platforms, and moments of intent. One campaign impression might lead to a Google search two hours later, a product page visit the next day, and a purchase on an entirely different channel.
Yet for many marketers, measurement remains frozen in single-channel snapshots. Despite all the talk about omnichannel strategy, most measurement still happens in isolation. One set of metrics from your CTV partner, another from your social platforms, and something different from your DSP—each with its own definitions, baselines, and blind spots. The result is a fractured understanding of what’s driving performance.
This disconnect is widely acknowledged. In DISQO’s recent research with AdExchanger, nearly 80% of advertisers said measuring campaigns across platforms is critically important. But only 24% say they can do it effectively. That means most marketers make investment decisions without fully understanding what’s working or how channels interact to drive outcomes.
When measurement systems can’t follow the consumer journey across touchpoints, they reduce everything to isolated events. They reward last-touch clicks, overlook key moments of influence, and mask the compounding effect of exposure across platforms.
Cross-platform measurement solves this. It replaces siloed snapshots with a continuous view of consumers' engagement, from first impression to final conversion. It allows marketers to compare the performance of different media partners objectively, understand overlap and duplication, and optimize with clarity instead of guesswork. In practice, it’s the difference between managing channels and managing impact. But reach alone isn’t the end goal. To truly understand what moves consumers, you must measure across the entire funnel.
Marketers need to know what happened, understand why, and know what to do next. That requires more than top-line metrics or last-click attribution. It requires a full-funnel view.
In DISQO’s research with AdExchanger, 38% of advertisers cited “tracking the full customer journey” as a top challenge. That number rivals cross-platform fragmentation and the cost of measurement itself. Despite having more data than ever, most teams still struggle to connect upper-funnel awareness and consideration with lower-funnel outcomes like site visits, search lift, and conversions.
Instead, they’re optimizing for what’s easiest to measure: clicks, CPMs, and on-platform engagements. But these are proxies, not proof. The picture is incomplete when measurement is limited to a single part of the funnel. A campaign may appear underwhelming on surface metrics, while in reality, it’s moving consumers in ways that matter, like prompting product discovery, driving branded search, or influencing purchase decisions days later. Those effects go unseen without behavioral visibility into the middle and bottom of the funnel.
Full-funnel measurement closes this gap. It reveals how brand exposure translates to real-world action, whether it’s a lift in unaided awareness or a spike in ecommerce activity. And when you build measurement on top of an audience of real people with direct relationships, it enables marketers to track those signals across channels, without relying on cookies or stitched-together datasets.
This is the foundation of effective optimization: knowing which creative got the most engagement and which one actually drove results. Not just where your impressions landed, but what they influenced. Not just how your media performed, but how your marketing worked. When full-funnel measurement becomes the standard, not the exception, marketing stops reacting to metrics and starts steering outcomes.
It’s one thing to talk about full-funnel measurement. It’s another to see what it can unlock. When a new zero-sugar, plant-based energy drink brand entered the market, it faced an uphill climb. Dominated by well-known competitors and saturated with wellness claims, the category left little room for new entrants, especially those trying to win over health-conscious consumers aged 18–29.
The brand needed to cut through with proof that its media investments were actually moving people, from awareness to intent.
That’s where DISQO came in.
Measured against DISQO’s normative benchmarks, the campaign didn’t just perform well—it broke through:
This is the power of person-level, full-funnel measurement: It doesn’t just show who saw the ad. It shows what happened next and what mattered most.
Marketers have more tools, platforms, and performance signals than ever before. But without a unified measurement approach, the complexity just creates confusion. You can’t optimize what you can’t compare. And you can’t grow what you can’t see.
Siloed measurement limits decision-making to what each platform chooses to show. It obscures the relationships between touchpoints, distorts media effectiveness, and leaves campaigns under-leveraged. In a landscape where performance is under the microscope and budgets demand accountability, that’s not sustainable.
It’s time to reject the default and rebuild measurement on a foundation of clarity, consistency, and control.
DISQO offers a better option:
Marketers don’t need more data—they need measurement that makes sense. And they need it now. If your current approach leaves you stitching together partial views, it’s time to reframe the question. Don’t ask, What did the platform tell me? Ask, What did the campaign actually do?
Want insights from top brands and agencies on how they’re tackling today’s toughest ad measurement challenges? Download the State of Programmatic Measurement report from DISQO and AdExchanger. Ready to measure what matters across every channel? Let’s connect. Reach out at hello@disqo.com.