Marketers have never had more ways to measure performance. They also may have never had a harder time answering the question that matters most: What actually drove growth? 

Over the past year on the BRAVE COMMERCE podcast, we’ve heard leaders across brands, platforms, and the broader marketing industry share how they are navigating this challenge. Across these conversations, a common pattern emerged: marketers are looking beyond who gets credit for a conversion to understand what actually created incremental growth, where demand was influenced, and how measurement can help them act sooner.

ROAS, attribution, and traditional measurement models are still powerful tools, but as we look toward 2027, the bigger change is in the questions marketers need measurement to answer.

Below, we explore five ways marketing measurement is evolving and what leading marketers should prioritize in 2027.

1. Prove Incremental Growth, Not Just Attribution

For years, marketers have worked to determine which channel, campaign, or touchpoint deserves credit for a conversion. That question still matters, but the bar for proving marketing impact is getting higher.

As we look toward 2027, knowing where an outcome came from will increasingly need to be paired with understanding what actually caused additional growth. Did an investment create demand or sales that would not have happened otherwise, or did it simply receive credit for an outcome already likely to occur?

Answering that requires more than a single measurement methodology. In her episode, Kate Hamill, VP of North America Enterprise Sales at Pinterest, described how leading marketers are combining multiple measurement methodologies to build a more complete understanding of impact.

🎙️ Listen to the full episode here

The value of combining these approaches isn't simply better attribution. Different methodologies answer different questions. Attribution can help marketers understand which touchpoints contributed to an outcome, while incrementality testing helps isolate whether an investment actually created additional demand or sales. Together, they can move marketers closer to understanding causality, not just credit.

Ben Sylvan, SVP of Connected Media at Keurig Dr Pepper, provides a useful example of what this next evolution looks like in practice. After Dr Pepper leveraged the viral Romeo TikTok moment to create a major campaign, the team looked beyond engagement and campaign response to isolate what the activation actually contributed to the business. After accounting for changes in distribution, the team estimated roughly 13% incremental sales attributable to the activation.

The next evolution of measurement isn't about replacing attribution with incrementality. It's about using attribution, experimentation, and incrementality measurement together to understand which investments are actually creating additional growth and where to invest next.

2. Measure Where Demand Is Created, Influenced, and Captured

A shopper may discover a product in one environment, consider it across several others, and ultimately purchase somewhere else. The challenge for marketers is understanding the different roles those interactions played in creating, influencing, and ultimately capturing demand. Looking only at the final measurable interaction can leave important parts of that journey out of the picture.

As marketers look toward 2027, accounting for how demand is created across the journey will require thinking about that journey the way the consumer experiences it: as one cohesive experience with a brand. Jennifer Berry, VP of Commerce & Digital at Our LEGO Agency, pointed out that while consumers don't separate creativity, media, commerce, and retail the way organizations often do, brands typically divide responsibility for those experiences across different teams, each with its own objectives and ways of measuring success.

That creates a challenge for measurement. When each team measures and optimizes its own part of the journey, brands can lose sight of how those interactions worked together to create demand and move a consumer toward purchase. Shared KPIs and objectives can help align teams around common business goals, rather than having each team optimize for its own measure of consumer engagement.

LEGO offers one example of how brands can begin to close that gap by bringing creativity, commerce, and retail together under one in-house agency. The company has built more connected experiences across its own channels, retail partners, and physical environments. As brands increasingly align teams around a connected consumer experience, measurement will need to evolve in the same direction, helping marketers understand how different touchpoints work together to create, influence, and ultimately capture demand.

3. Connect Commerce Media Measurement to Business Outcomes

More channels have created more data. More data has created more dashboards. Neither automatically creates a clearer picture of performance.

As commerce media expands across retailers, platforms, and media environments, brands aren't just navigating more channels. They're navigating different teams, budgets, definitions, reporting structures, and performance metrics. For marketers deciding where to invest, that fragmentation creates a practical problem: How do you compare performance when every environment measures it differently?

Toby Espinosa, Vice President of Ads at DoorDash, sees consistent measurement as fundamental to the continued growth of commerce media.

🎙️ Listen to the full episode here

His point goes beyond cleaner reporting. Shared measurement gives teams a common basis for evaluating investments against business outcomes, making it easier for budgets to move across organizational and channel boundaries based on what is actually driving growth.

At Mizkan, Megan Frank, SVP of Marketing and R&D, shared another side of the same challenge: connecting measurement more directly to business planning. Her team uses a custom measurement model to bring greater accountability to retailer conversations and shift the focus toward results-based planning.

The goal doesn't need to be making every platform metric identical. It is creating enough connectivity between data and measurement to understand how different investments contribute to common business outcomes.

This is where having the right technology in place becomes increasingly important. Tools like MikMak Aura can help brands connect media investment with commerce and retailer sales outcomes in one view, making it easier to understand incremental impact across channels and make more informed allocation decisions.

4. Use Real-Time Commerce Signals to Optimize While Campaigns Are Live

There will always be value in understanding what worked. The challenge is that marketers increasingly need answers while there is still time to do something with them.

Branden Goodman, Head of Media & Marketing Capabilities for U.S. Beauty & Wellbeing at Unilever, captured that tension particularly well in a recent episode. As measurement environments become more complex, he cautioned against getting distracted by the sheer number of metrics available.

🎙️ Listen to the full episode here

Goodman refers to this as avoiding “measurement theater.” For Unilever, the objective is not simply to demonstrate media performance, but to hold media accountable for business delivery and use measurement to make better business decisions.

MMM remains an important part of that measurement ecosystem, but Goodman also highlighted one of its inherent limitations: “the issue with MMMs is that they’re backwards-looking.”

That creates an important opportunity for the next generation of measurement. Long-term models can help marketers understand what has historically driven performance and inform strategic planning, while real-time commerce and media signals can help them recognize what is changing while a campaign is still running.

That gives marketers an opportunity to use measurement not only for retrospective reporting, but for in-market optimization, identifying changes in performance early enough to adjust creative, media, or investment while those decisions can still affect the outcome.

Goodman shared that Unilever uses a mix of signals available on a daily basis, from sources and platforms like MikMak, to understand how creative decisions are driving engagement and help inform decisions across its broader measurement ecosystem.

5. Turn Commerce Intelligence Into Predictive Decision-Making

Historically, measurement has largely been descriptive: What happened? Which campaign performed best? Which channel drove the highest return?

Increasingly, marketers will expect their data to help quickly and constantly answer another question: What should we do next?

That shift depends on connected data, and AI has the potential to dramatically accelerate what marketers can do with it.

Bob Liodice, CEO of the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), similarly sees AI's ability to synthesize large amounts of information and make it understandable as transformational, with the potential to improve transparency across an increasingly complex media ecosystem.

This is where commerce measurement begins to evolve into commerce intelligence. Instead of simply identifying that performance changed, marketers can increasingly use connected commerce signals to understand why, model what could happen under different conditions, identify emerging opportunities, and determine where to adjust investment.

At MikMak, this is also where we see commerce intelligence heading. Capabilities like MikMak Aura are designed to bring commerce, marketing, and sales signals together to help brands move beyond understanding past performance toward forecasting outcomes, modeling scenarios, and optimizing decisions.

AI doesn't make strong measurement less important. It makes the quality, connectivity, and timeliness of the underlying data even more important.

The Value of Measurement Is What It Helps You Do Next

Marketing measurement isn’t moving toward a single metric or methodology. What’s changing is what marketers need measurement to help them understand and do.

The next era of measurement will require marketers to ask better questions:

✔  Did this investment create incremental growth?
✔ Where was demand created, influenced, and captured?
✔ How do signals across commerce media connect to business outcomes?
✔ What is changing right now?
✔ What is likely to happen next — and what should we do about it?

Answering those questions requires having the right tools and technology in place to connect different approaches and signals, building a more complete understanding of marketing impact and making those insights easier to act on.

In 2027, the advantage won't necessarily belong to the marketers with more measurement. It will belong to those who can use measurement to understand what is driving growth and turn that understanding into the next decision.

See how MikMak helps brands connect media, commerce, and sales data to understand what's driving growth, predict what's next, and make smarter investment decisions. Schedule a demo to learn more.