If your marketing budget was roughly shaped by gut instinct a few years back and has been tweaked incrementally ever since based on what the dashboards show, you are in very good company. This describes the reality for most marketing teams, including some impressively sophisticated ones. 

The problem is that those incremental tweaks are being made with incomplete information. The dashboards show what is performing well according to the platforms that own the dashboards. They are designed to be convincing. They are not designed to give you the whole picture. 

Here is what the whole picture actually looks like. 

The Data Is Telling You a Story. It’s Just Not the Right One. 

Last-click attribution, which is still the default for most Australian businesses, assigns the full credit for a conversion to the final marketing touchpoint before purchase. This produces dashboards that consistently flatter search, retargeting, and direct channels, because they sit at the end of the customer journey, while quietly under-valuing brand advertising, video, and upper-funnel activity that did the real work earlier on. 

Analytic Partners’ ROI Genome research, drawing on data from over 1,000 major brands across global markets, puts a precise figure on the scale of this distortion. Forty-five per cent of advertising’s commercial impact operates through cross-channel halo effects, meaning channels are influencing the performance of other channels in ways that single-source attribution is structurally unable to detect. 

The same research finds that brands relying heavily on last-click data routinely over-state some channels’ performance by between two and ten times. That is not a rounding error. That is the kind of measurement gap that produces systematically wrong budget decisions, year after year, compounding quietly. 

45% of advertising’s commercial impact runs through cross-channel halo effects that last-click attribution cannot see. Some channels are being over-valued by up to 10 times. (Analytic Partners, ROI Genome) 

Source: Analytic Partners, ROI Genome Intelligence Report 

The Predictable Outcome: Under-Investing in What Actually Grows Brands 

When budgets are built around channels that look strong in dashboards, the almost inevitable result is a gradual drift toward short-term performance media and away from brand-building investment. It happens slowly, and it looks sensible at every step. 

Performance channels show clear, attributable returns. Brand activity is harder to tie to immediate revenue. In a quarterly review, the obvious call is to back what the numbers support. 

Analytic Partners’ research directly challenges this logic. Brand marketing outperforms performance marketing in terms of sales and ROI 80% of the time. Upper-funnel tactics are 60% more effective over the long term than lower-funnel tactics, while being only 25% less effective in the short term. So the trade-off is not nearly as favourable to performance media as dashboards suggest. 

ADMA’s Future Ready: 5 Forces Shaping Marketing in 2026 report is worth quoting directly here: ‘Performance marketing has become table stakes. In an AI-democratised world, brand differentiation is the real ROI.’ Australian brands making allocation decisions based purely on last-click data are systematically under-investing in the thing that will actually differentiate them. 

Source: Analytic Partners, ROI Genome; ADMA, Future Ready: 5 Forces Shaping Marketing in 2026 

What a Better Framework Actually Looks Like 

This is not an argument against performance data or the rigour that digital measurement enables. Campaign-level attribution is genuinely useful for in-channel decisions: which creative is working, which audience is responding, where to adjust bids. Use it for that. 

The issue is using campaign-level attribution to answer a strategic-level question: how should I allocate my total marketing investment across channels and between brand and performance activity? 

That question requires a different tool. Marketing mix modelling addresses it by statistically separating the contribution of each channel across your full media investment over a meaningful historical period. It can show you the effect of television on subsequent search performance. It can identify the exact investment level where a channel starts generating diminishing returns. It can simulate the revenue impact of a different allocation strategy before you commit the budget. 

ANZ’s marketing team deployed commercial mix modelling specifically to enable more informed, whole-of-customer investment trade-offs. That shift, from dashboard-led allocation to model-led allocation, is what changed the quality of their strategic decisions. 

Source: AMI, ANZ commercial mix modelling case study 

Where Most Budgets Are Mis-Weighted 

Across brands that have gone through this analysis, three consistent patterns emerge. 

• Brand and awareness investment is under-weighted. It has long-term effects that are invisible to short-term attribution but that drive the sales baseline that performance media then converts. Cutting brand investment to fund performance often produces a delayed but significant erosion in results. 

• Upper-funnel video is under-weighted. It influences consumer consideration powerfully, but its effect is rarely captured by click-through measurement. Brands consistently underestimate how much their video activity is contributing to the downstream search conversions they see in dashboards. 

• Offline channels, where relevant to the mix, tend to be invisible in digital measurement entirely. Their contribution to brand salience and sales does not show up anywhere in a standard analytics setup, which means it is easy to assume they are not contributing at all. 

The reallocation required to correct these patterns is often not dramatic. A 10 to 15% shift from over-weighted short-term channels to under-weighted brand activity can produce a revenue impact over two to three years that is considerably larger than the number suggests on a spreadsheet. 

Three Questions to Start With 

You do not need a full marketing mix model to start thinking more clearly about allocation. These three questions are a useful starting point. 

First: If your best-performing campaign went dark for a full quarter, what would happen to your sales baseline? If the honest answer is ‘not much’, that channel may be harvesting demand that was created by other activity, rather than generating it independently. 

Second: What percentage of your media investment is in channels that are invisible to last-click attribution? If that percentage is low, your budget probably reflects your measurement capability, not your commercial opportunity. 

Third: How long has your channel allocation been relatively stable? Budget persistence, where the split stays similar year on year because it performed well previously, is one of the most common causes of misallocation. Markets shift, channel efficiency shifts, and last year’s optimal budget is not necessarily this year’s. 

Modern MMM platforms are built to make this analysis faster, continuously updated, and accessible without a data science team. The goal is straightforward: close the gap between what the dashboards show and what is actually driving your commercial performance. 

Ready to see what your actual channel contribution looks like? Email us at [email protected] to start the conversation