For over a decade, digital marketing thrived on the promise of measurability. We built dashboards, obsessed over attribution models, and continuously optimised our way to higher CTRs and lower CPAs. The logic was simple: if you could measure it, you could optimise it. And if you could optimise it, you could grow. But the ground beneath those assumptions is shifting.
Why ‘Traditional’ KPIs Tell an Incomplete Story
Travel Booking Journeys Are Long and Messy
Expedia found the average travel purchase journey lasts 71 days, with over a month in the inspiration phase. Another study estimated around 45 touchpoints before a hotel booking.
That's 45 moments of influence across ads, search, OTAs, reviews, and conversations. Expecting a single ad to drive an instant booking isn't realistic. Upper-funnel efforts plant the seeds that lower-funnel campaigns later harvest.
Value Lives in the Journey
Value in luxury usually doesn't come from instant gratification. It's created through anticipation, discovery, emotional resonance, and the gradual building of desire.
A luxury watch buyer doesn't click an ad and purchase immediately. They research heritage, visit boutiques, absorb the brand story.
Platform metrics optimised for speed and conversion miss this entirely. They measure the final transaction but ignore the months of brand building that made it possible.
Marketing Platforms Are Turning Opaque
Zero-click searches now dominate. Google, social platforms, and AI assistants keep users within their ecosystems.
AI-driven ad systems like Google Performance Max and Meta Advantage+ control targeting, bidding, and placement with far less transparency. Keywords, audiences, and placements are partly hidden behind algorithmic decisions.
Marketers still see results, but with less context. Understanding why campaigns perform the way they do has become significantly harder.
Privacy Is Reshaping Measurement
GDPR and ePrivacy tightened data collection. Safari and Firefox restricted third-party cookies years ago. Now first-party tracking windows are shrinking.
Many attribution signals are disappearing, widening the gap between real customer journeys and what data shows. Even solutions like server-side tagging don't fully solve the problem.
The metrics marketers relied on now capture only a fragment of the full picture.
Platform Metrics Ignore Brand Value
Performance platforms optimise for immediate conversions but don't measure what those conversions cost in brand equity.
A luxury hotel pushing "Book Now - 20% Off" messaging sees strong short-term metrics. But the brand value erodes. Discount messaging attracts price-sensitive guests, trains the market to wait for deals, and contradicts the exclusivity the brand built.
What platform dashboards miss is whether marketing strengthens or undermines positioning and pricing power. For luxury brands, the tactics that deliver the best immediate metrics often do the most damage to brand perception.
The Perfect Attribution Myth
The obsession with perfect attribution is relatively new and misguided. TV commercials, out-of-home campaigns, and PR placements never offered it. You can't track which viewer of a billboard later became a customer, or quantify the exact revenue from a media feature. But marketers understand the value of visibility among the right audience.
Digital brand marketing works the same way. Search visibility, AI recommendations, and targeted social reach build awareness and shape perception. The impact shows up in brand strength, market position, and future bookings, not in perfect revenue attribution.
Platform data remains tactically useful. CTR compares ad creative. Conversion data guides campaign optimisation. But for strategic decisions, we need to read broader signals, just as we've always done with traditional brand marketing.
Analysing the Signals
Leading brands track signals that reflect business impact and long-term brand strength, rather than trying to attribute each conversion.
Brand visibility: Before people book, they need to know you. A luxury hotel featured in Condé Nast Traveler can't draw a direct line from editorial to bookings, but understands the relevant visibility creates demand that surfaces later. When these metrics move upward, they're leading indicators of future bookings.
Incremental sales impact: Use test-and-control experiments (running campaigns in some regions while holding back in similar ones) to measure the lift marketing drives versus what would have happened organically. This reveals actual contribution rather than just correlation.
Market share: Revenue shows short-term results; market share reveals whether a brand is gaining or losing ground. Share shifts often signal strategic momentum before it shows up in absolute revenue.
Brand uplift and perception: Monitor how campaigns affect brand awareness (such as branded search volume) and sentiment. It shows whether efforts are building the right kind of future demand. Strong short-term metrics mean nothing if they're eroding pricing power or attracting the wrong guests.
The shift is from "Which campaign drove this booking?" to "Are we seeing signals that our marketing is strengthening our market position and building momentum?"
From Scorecard to Compass
The old KPIs offered clarity. You could point to a number and say "this worked."
But in a fragmented, privacy-first landscape where journeys span weeks or months and dozens of touchpoints, those numbers only tell part of the story. Optimising for incomplete data means potentially making decisions that hurt long-term performance.
Measurement has become more strategic. It's a compass reading signals that indicate direction. Not about perfect attribution of what converted today, but whether the brand is building the momentum that will drive growth tomorrow.
