Digital marketing has become genuinely difficult to explain to people outside of it.
This isn't because marketers are bad at communicating. It's because digital marketing no longer operates the way most business functions do — and the mental models that work for evaluating other investments don't translate cleanly.
When someone in finance, operations, or engineering looks at a marketing budget, they often apply the same logic they'd use for equipment, headcount, or software licenses. Identify the line items. Calculate the return on each. Cut the underperformers. Reallocate to the winners. This is rational. It works in most contexts.
It doesn't work in digital.
The Interconnection Problem
Modern digital advertising platforms — Google, Meta, LinkedIn, programmatic networks — are ecosystems, not line items. The campaigns inside them are interconnected in ways that aren't always visible, even to the people running them.
A display campaign with weak direct ROI might be introducing your brand to people who later convert through search. A retargeting campaign can't function without a prospecting campaign feeding it. Pausing one thing doesn't just remove that thing — it changes the behavior of everything connected to it.
This is hard to explain without sounding evasive. Simplify, and it sounds like you're hiding something. Go deep, and you hit a wall — the person you're talking to doesn't have the foundational knowledge to evaluate what you're saying. Not because they're not smart. Because this isn't their job.
The Measurement Problem
The other expectation that doesn't transfer: clean ROI on individual tactics.
In most business functions, you can draw a reasonably straight line between investment and outcome. Digital marketing rarely works this way. A single conversion might involve a paid search click, a retargeting ad, an organic blog post, and an email — spread across days or weeks. Attribution models exist to assign credit, but they're estimates, not accounting. The platforms themselves have competing incentives around how credit gets assigned. And privacy changes have made tracking less precise, not more.
When someone asks for ROI by line item, they're asking a question that has an answer in their world but only has approximations in ours.
The B2B Problem
In B2B, this gets worse. The gap between marketing activity and closed revenue can be months — sometimes over a year. A lot happens in that time, and most of it erases the connection between the two.
A lead comes in from a paid campaign and gets tagged with a source field. Then it enters the CRM and begins its journey. It gets assigned to sales, worked, neglected, re-engaged. The contact changes — the original lead forwards the conversation to their boss, or leaves the company, or turns out not to be the decision-maker. The deal that eventually closes may involve people who never touched the original campaign.
By the time revenue hits the books, the attribution data is either gone, buried, or meaningless. Finance sees revenue. Marketing sees spend. Nobody sees the thread between them.
This creates two problems. First, ROI calculations skew negative — a campaign that generated real pipeline looks like it produced nothing because the wins were never traced back. Second, campaigns get killed before they can work. Someone looks at the numbers after 60 or 90 days, sees weak returns, and pauses the spend. But the leads are still in the pipeline. By the time they close, no one remembers where they came from.
If you're evaluating digital marketing on the same timeline you'd use for a trade show, you're measuring the wrong window.
The Control Problem
There's also an assumption that digital marketing offers precise control. You set a budget, target an audience, get results. If something isn't working, you turn it off.
That used to be more true. Platforms have moved steadily toward automation and broad targeting. Google's Performance Max campaigns don't let you see or control most of what's happening inside them. Meta's Advantage+ campaigns work similarly. Marketers have less ability to isolate variables, test individual tactics, or explain exactly where the money went.
Telling a CFO "we can't show you exactly what that $20,000 bought because the platform doesn't break it out" is not comfortable. But increasingly, it's accurate.
What This Means
None of this is a defense of vague reporting or unclear strategy. Marketers should still explain what they're doing and why. They should still connect activity to outcomes as clearly as possible.
But the people evaluating marketing need to understand that the system resists the kind of clean analysis they're used to. Digital marketing is not a set of independent investments. It's a web of interdependent activities running on platforms whose interests don't fully align with yours.
The most productive conversations happen when both sides acknowledge this. The marketer stops pretending they have more certainty than they do. The executive stops expecting a spreadsheet that maps inputs to outputs like a manufacturing process. And both focus on the questions that can actually be answered: Are we reaching the right people? Is the pipeline growing? Is revenue increasing relative to spend? Are we learning anything that makes next quarter better?
Those aren't line-item questions. But they're the right ones.
