Our social media lead introduced me to ‘Girl Math’ last week – a Gen Z term given to the creative ways we justify spending money on the things that we want but don’t necessarily need.

While I’ve been guilty of using Girl Math myself, it got me thinking about how marketers have their own version – let’s call it Marketer Math.

The idea behind Marketer Math is simple – the act of chasing metrics to justify activity, without stopping to think if it’s actually driving the right outcomes.

Well at Organic we believe it’s time to replace Marketer Math with Marketing Clarity – and put all our focus back on metrics that actually drive growth.

The illusion of control

Marketing has never been more measurable, yet never more misunderstood. 

Dashboards give an appearance of certainty. Ratios and spikes feel like proof. But many of the metrics we trust most are quietly distorting decisions. This is the data delusion – the belief that more numbers equal more control.

Every CMO has heard:

• “ROAS is up, so we’re winning.”
• “We hit target by driving CPA down.”
• “Our CTR beats the industry average.”

Each sounds rational. Each can be dangerously misleading. If you’re struggling with performance marketing, here’s why: 

You didn’t lose the budget because your ads performed badly, you lost it because the metrics you trusted told a comforting lie.

If you’re being asked to do more with less – it’s because the  board didn’t see future growth risk or the true cost of building a brand; they saw a dashboard full of green arrows.

At the heart of Marketing Math is metrics that mislead, and here’s some we think you need to be wary of:

1. ROAS: return on already sold

ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) appears to be the perfect efficiency metric: spend £1, get £4 back. But ROAS can shift your focus onto capturing existing demand , rather than creating new demand.

Research analysing over 500 campaigns shows that brands focusing 60% of their budget on brand-building and 40% on activation deliver stronger long-term growth than those chasing short-term ROAS efficiency¹. ROAS can make a brand look healthy today while masking a decline in future demand.

Organic’s view:

Performance converts demand, and brand creates it.

Optimising only for ROAS shrinks the future customer pool. That’s why Organic uses Share of Intent, which measures the proportion of customer intent your brand owns at each stage of the buying journey – a forward-looking indicator of future market share, not just recent conversion.

2. Last-click attribution: the striker fallacy

Last-click attribution gives full credit to the final touchpoint before conversion – like giving the striker all the credit for a goal and ignoring the rest of the team.

A Google/IPSOS study found that most shoppers use three to five touchpoints before purchasing, yet 78% of marketers still rely on last-click attribution². And less than a quarter of those marketers believe it gives an accurate picture of effectiveness³.

Last-click flatters channels that close rather than channels that create intent. Over time, this leads to cuts in brand-building and an over-reliance on harvesting what’s already above the surface line.

Organic’s Advice: Last-click attribution undervales brand salience and stifles future demand. At Organic we use the Market Map – a model to show you how awareness, trust and recall interact across the custom journey, so investment follows influence.

3. CTR and CPA: comfort, not clarity

Click-through rate (CTR) and cost per acquisition (CPA) dominate dashboards because they’re easy to track and move quickly – but they’re ultimately shallow.

A high CTR may show ad engagement, not intent or future purchase. A low CPA might be efficient, but are you acquiring profitable customers or simply cheap ones?

Meta found that last-click and CPA-driven optimisation undervalues upper-funnel activity and creative impact by nearly 50%⁴. In other words, what appears inefficient may actually be driving future demand.

Organic’s advice:  CTR and CPA can guide tactical optimisation, but they don’t measure growth. You can have a high CTR and low CPA while wasting budget on customers who would have bought from you anyway.

4. Correlation isn’t causation

Metrics like ROAS, CTR and CPA update quickly, which gives a sense of control – but speed can disguise shallowness.

Sales might rise after a campaign, but if the budget was shifted entirely to branded search terms’ or conversion terms to help you hit that short term target, you may simply be paying for clicks you would have earned organically and increasing your cost of acquisition for tomorrow.

From marketer math to marketing clarity

When focusing on ROAS or last-click in your strategy or reporting, you optimise what’s easy to measure, not what creates growth. When funds flow only to what’s immediately measurable, the foundations of future demand erode.

Strategic Clarity comes from seeing performance AND brand in one view:

• Brand building that drives mental availability⁵
• Brand familiarity that fuels conversion
• Measurement that reflects how people actually buy, not how channels and platforms take the credit.

Overcoming the dashboard delusion

Too many marketers aren’t optimising for growth; they’re optimising for dashboards. 

We’ve mistaken movement for momentum.

The last click didn’t create intent, it just caught it.

Each channel or discipline defends its own metrics and activity. Individually, they make sense. Collectively, growth slows.

As marketers chase dashboard wins, awareness decays, CPAs rise, and future demand dwindles.

Our challenge: 

• Stop asking “What converted?”
• Start asking “What caused the conversion?”

The solution: Share of Intent

Share of Intent measures how much of your category’s active demand is directed toward your brand at each stage of the buying journey – from first awareness through to final conversion. Unlike traditional metrics that show where intent is collected, Share of Intent reveals where intent is created.

It brings together activity that generates demand and that which harvests existing demand into one measurable model, enabling marketers to invest with confidence in activity that grows tomorrow’s market share, not activity that fluffs just today’s dashboard.

Action for CMOs

• Move from performance to provenance.
  Stop asking only “What closed the sale?” and start asking “Where did that journey begin?”
• Balance origin and outcome.
  Optimise for the creation of intent, not just the capture of it.
• Invest in signals that grow the pool of future buyers,
  not just those that convert the buyers you already had.

Put clarity into action with IntentOS

IntentOS is our decision-making framework built for the AI era. It uses Share of Intent (SoI) to map how awareness, trust and consideration flow across your market, showing where growth originates and where it’s being missed.

Talk to us about building your Market Map and see how Organic can help your brand create, capture and compound intent for long-term growth.

Notes

1. IPA Databank, “The Long and the Short of It,” Les Binet & Peter Field (2013, updated 2019)
2. Google / Ipsos Consumer Study (2022)
3. eMarketer, “The State of Attribution” (2024)
4. Meta Marketing Science, “Conversion Modelling and Incrementality” (2023)
5. Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, “How Brands Grow,” Byron Sharp (2010)