Most people would agree with that. The trap is the two words sitting between them: tracking and attribution. All four get used interchangeably, and the confusion is where most marketing strategies fall apart.

• Metrics are the numbers you choose to display, or that a system reads back to you.
• Tracking is deciding which numbers to report and verifying they’re being reported accurately.
• Attribution is whether you can tell which inputs, channels, or collateral caused which numbers.
• Optimization is whether you — or the system you’ve built — can act on that knowledge to change future numbers.

Each step depends on the previous one being solid. You can’t optimize without attribution. You can’t attribute without tracking. You can’t track without picking metrics that mean something.

Most early accounts are stuck at step one — measuring the wrong things — and trying to optimize their way out of it. Skipping steps is how you get a 47-tab Looker Studio dashboard that doesn’t change a single decision. So when someone asks, “Are you optimizing toward X?”, the most useful answer is often: “We can’t yet. Attribution isn’t configured for that signal.”

A Quiz & A Few Reflections:

If you think you have metrics figured out, refer to the quiz or to Axiom №1 — are you counting the bottom line metrics? If not, you may need to revisit metrics and tracking.

If you think you have attribution figured out: you have $10, $100, and $1,000 to allocate to three channels, and they have to be kept separate. Can you answer truthfully which channels would be best off with which allotments?

If you think you have optimization figured out: what creatives are you testing? If you are running A/B tests without true metrics, valid tracking, and thorough attribution, your optimization isn’t absolute, its biased towards surface level.

These questions are mostly impossible to answer. 99% of businesses don’t have the infrastructure to deduce them, but the worst part is they think they do.

The best you can do is peel back one layer, find what truth you can stand on, and work on the next.