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Surveys of 2025 marketing budgets suggest marketers will have more to spend in 2025 than they did in 2024. While that’s good news after 12 months of struggling with stingy budgets — where only 24% of chief marketing officers (CMOs) felt they had sufficient funds to meet their goals — the pressure is on marketing leaders to show forward progress in the form of growth.
With that mandate in mind, marketing leaders and their teams should revisit their strategies for measuring marketing return on investment (ROI). They need to confirm they are using an approach that ensures accuracy and allows them to capture attribution for every conversion.
In this post, we’ll discuss what marketing ROI is and why it matters. We also look at how to calculate marketing ROI across multiple channels and examine some of the challenges in measuring marketing ROI effectively.
ROI in marketing is a metric measuring the revenue generated by marketing strategies and campaigns compared with their costs. As such, marketing ROI is a crucial element linking marketing to actual revenue and business growth.
An accurate picture of marketing ROI helps marketing leaders in several ways, including:
Here’s how to calculate marketing ROI using a basic formula:
(Sales Growth – Marketing Cost) ÷ Marketing Cost = ROI.
The answer is presented as a number or percentage. For example, if your financial services business sees an increase of $500,000 in sales and marketing costs are $100,000, marketing ROI would be $400,000 divided by $100,000, for a factor of 4 or 400%.
Now, that’s a very simple way to calculate marketing ROI. But you can use variations of the formula to calculate more complex ROI situations, such as removing organic sales growth from the equation for a more accurate picture of marketing’s performance.
To do this, first deduct organic sales from total sales. If annual organic sales are $100,000, sales revenue attributable to marketing is $400,000. Total sales of $400,000 minus $100,000 in marketing costs = $300,000, or a marketing ROI of 300% or a factor of 3.
Measuring marketing ROI is quite simple, especially if you use any one of the many ROI calculators available online. How to measure marketing ROI accurately is not as easy. The formula presupposes that you are using accurate numbers and capturing the right data on every sale. But are you? Have you attributed conversions and sales to the right marketing investments?
For many businesses, especially those operating both online and offline, this is the key challenge. Take phone call conversions, for example. If a customer calls from a search ad and makes a large purchase, is that non-digital data captured in your system? If not, there’s a hole in your data collection. Worse, your marketing ROI won’t provide a complete picture of what marketing efforts are working and which ones aren’t.
Here are some other common challenges you might face when trying to measure the return on your marketing investment:
The modern buying journey is more complex than ever. It typically extends across multiple channels, such as social media, text, email, and ads, before a customer converts. This makes assigning credit to specific initiatives challenging.
Say you attribute a home insurance policy sale to a click on a paid search ad. But what if that customer also picked up the phone to speak with a contact centre agent about the policy’s details before they converted? Are you misattributing that sale? And what if the customer bought a policy totally unrelated to the product promoted in the pay-per-click ad?
Misattribution is most common when tracking offline actions, such as phone calls or in-store visits. These are harder to track and link to specific marketing efforts unless you can digitise the data and standardise it with more easily traceable online activity.
One way to overcome this issue is to use call tracking and analytics as part of your revenue execution and marketing attribution efforts. Call tracking solutions like Invoca can log 100% of calls and turn the content into a format compatible with existing data so it can be analysed for attribution and customer insights.
Technology is also making in-store attribution easier. For instance, in-store beacons using Bluetooth note proximity attribution when a customer’s smartphone is detected nearby.
Another challenge in measuring ROI is the length of the typical sales cycle. Sales don’t usually happen overnight, and marketing campaigns can often take weeks or even months to convert leads into customers. That’s especially true when consumers are considering high-stakes purchases like an automobile or a health insurance policy.
The longer it takes to connect marketing to revenue, the more challenging it becomes. Consider a patient waiting in a medical office who happens to see a six-month-old print ad in a magazine or the homeowner who didn’t see your spring landscaping email until they cleaned up their inbox in July. Will marketing get proper credit when those customers convert?
There is also the vexing question of data accuracy, which is amplified by a long sales cycle and difficulty tracking offline conversions. Because of these challenges, any missing or incomplete attribution data can skew marketing ROI calculations.
Only multichannel analysis, where you integrate online and offline activity, can provide a complete, detailed picture of the entire customer journey and help ensure that you are not overlooking critical insights.
In the face of these challenges, measuring marketing ROI seems daunting. But help is at hand, especially from tools and technologies across the digital and analog domains.
Web analytics is one valuable digital tool. It allows you to analyse user data collected via various tools and technologies. For example, if a painting company’s pay-per-click (PPC) ad campaign uses a tracking URL to collect data on search engines, keywords, and call-to-action (CTA) responses from users, that data can be used to optimise future ads, the business’s website, social posts, and other marketing materials.
A call tracking tool like Invoca provides equally granular data from phone calls and bridges the gap between a customer’s online and offline interactions. By measuring across all channels in the customer journey, rather than just the digital journey, marketers access more accurate ROI measurements for campaigns, especially those driven by phone leads.
You can improve marketing ROI by taking a structured approach toward improving the efficiency and effectiveness of your campaigns. In short order, this can lead to higher returns and better allocation of resources within your marketing budget.
Here are five straightforward steps to help you enhance your marketing return on investment:
Use tools like tracking URLs, call tracking and analysis, and web analytics to accurately attribute revenue to specific campaigns. Those campaigns can only become more effective with more data at your fingertips.
With attribution data from online and offline phone conversions in hand, you can easily identify the marketing channels that consistently deliver the best results. Immediately adjust the budget to allocate more resources to those high performers.
You can also parse the data to identify poorly performing campaigns across those channels. For example, if Invoca’s call analytics show an ad campaign is driving more non-sales-related calls, you are reaching the wrong audience. Cut the campaign and focus the resources on strategies that deliver the right calls.
Data generated from phone calls, as well as from online activity, can provide a wealth of insights about your customers’ needs and preferences. By going even further to analyse the voice of the customer (VoC), you can gain detailed insight that will allow you to create precise audience segments for your marketing campaigns with messaging tailored to those customers.
Keep your campaign performance running high by continuously measuring and adjusting investments and tactics based on the performance insights the data provides. You can maximise conversions online and over the phone by regularly testing new strategies and content for ads, landing pages, email, and social campaigns.
Marketers need granular attribution from phone calls and other offline conversions, as well as online activity, to create a complete picture of the customer journey and the true returns delivered by marketing campaigns. Only then can they accurately navigate the challenges in attribution and confidently measure marketing ROI.
Invoca helps optimise marketing campaigns by identifying high-value leads and providing precise VoC insights from 100% of phone calls. This bridges the gap between a customer’s online and offline journeys, creating one seamless picture for marketing.
That one seamless picture of the customer journey is what marketers need to avoid missing the mark with marketing ROI in 2025. Invoca’s call tracking, transcription, and AI-driven analytics complement online tracking to deliver precise digital data and actionable insights to marketing.
These insights can help marketers identify the highest-performing marketing channels for the business, reduce wasted ad and marketing spend, reach the right audience at the right time with the right message, and fully optimise their campaigns.
See how Invoca works in this short video:
If you are looking for additional insight into how to measure and improve marketing ROI, see these resources from Invoca:
Invoca uses the transformative power of AI to help businesses optimise their marketing campaigns and boost ROI. Book a customised demo today to see how our platform can help drive revenue and enhance your bottom line.
