Activity-led digital marketing metrics can mislead leadership, distort decisions and obscure meaningful commercial progress. The problem is not that organisations measure too much — it is that they measure the wrong things with considerable precision.
Paid media buys access to an audience. Organic authority builds the independent recognition and credibility that make a brand believable. The two are not interchangeable.
A digital marketing plan defines activity. A digital marketing strategy explains how digital creates commercial advantage and changes the position of the business. Most organisations have one. Fewer have the other.
Organisations rarely have a shortage of search data. They have a shortage of organisational attention around what that data means — and a structural problem in how it reaches the people who could act on it.