Maketer's Wish List
At 173tech, we partner with ambitious marketing teams to help them get more from their data. Over the years, we have seen first-hand the pressure on marketing leaders to deliver growth while justifying every pound of spend, and the frustration that comes from working with incomplete, fragmented, or untrustworthy data.
In this article, we dig into the most common complaints we hear from marketers, what they wish they had at their fingertips, and how these wishes can be turned into reality.
Attribution You Can Actually Trust
The wish:
“I want to know which marketing activities are really driving results, not just clicks, but actual revenue I can attribute with confidence.”
The challenge:
Attribution has long been one of the thorniest problems in marketing. Standard models are full of trade-offs:
Last-click attribution gives all the credit to the final touchpoint, ignoring the brand awareness, content, and nurturing that got the customer there in the first place.
First-click attribution swings the other way, exaggerating the role of initial discovery while overlooking the long road to conversion.
Multi-touch attribution tries to spread the credit, but quickly becomes complicated, opaque, and hard to explain to non-marketers.
On top of that, data silos across ad platforms, web analytics, and CRM systems make it difficult to stitch together a single customer journey. The result? Different channels claim the same conversion, metrics do not reconcile, and finance teams lose faith in marketing’s numbers. Without a trustworthy view of impact, marketing leaders struggle to defend budgets, scale the right campaigns, or gain alignment with the rest of the business.
The solution:
The answer lies in creating a single source of truth for attribution. By unifying marketing and revenue data into one consistent framework, companies can apply clear and transparent business rules that reflect how their customers actually buy. This involves:
Integrating data sources so ad spend, engagement, and sales are connected at the individual or cohort level.
Defining attribution models that are tailored to the business, for example, weighting early awareness campaigns differently from bottom-of-funnel retargeting.
Making attribution transparent so teams understand how credit is assigned, and finance can audit the numbers with confidence.
With this foundation in place, marketers can finally answer critical questions with certainty: Which campaigns bring in high-value customers? Which channels truly move the needle? Where should we reallocate spend for the highest return? The result is not just more efficient marketing, but a stronger partnership with leadership and finance built on trust in the data.
Ad-Level Insights
The wish:
“I want to understand which creative, copy, and audience combinations actually perform, not just by channel but across campaigns.”
The challenge:
For most marketers, the ad platform dashboards do not tell the full story. Each platform; Meta, Google, TikTok, LinkedIn, reports performance differently. Naming conventions are inconsistent, metrics are not directly comparable, and key creative elements (like imagery or copy) often get buried in unstructured data.
This creates three big problems:
No unified view: Marketers can see how an ad performs within a platform, but can’t easily compare themes across platforms to spot universal winners.
Inefficient testing: Without a clear sense of which creative variables drive success, teams waste time running isolated A/B tests and risk over-optimising for a single channel.
Scaling blind spots: It becomes difficult to double down on what actually works at a fundamental level, for example, which type of headline consistently engages audiences, or which imagery sparks conversions across regions.
As a result, creative optimisation becomes reactive, based on gut feel or anecdotal insights rather than systematic evidence.
The solution:
The key is to bring ad-level performance data into a single, structured, and standardised view. This means:
Normalising data across platforms so clicks, conversions, and engagement metrics can be compared apples-to-apples.
Slicing insights flexibly, by audience, format, or creative variable, to reveal which combinations drive performance not just in one channel, but across the entire marketing mix.
With this approach, marketers gain clarity on what truly resonates. Instead of saying “this ad set performed well on Meta,” they can say “short, benefit-led copy with people-focused imagery consistently outperforms across multiple platforms.” That insight empowers smarter creative strategy, faster iteration, and more confident scaling.
In practice, this shifts marketing from channel-by-channel optimisation to holistic creative intelligence, a step change that allows teams to invest in ideas with proven cross-platform impact, reduce wasted spend, and accelerate growth.
Customer Lifetime Value
The wish:
“I want to know the long-term value of customers acquired through different campaigns, not just their first purchase.”
The challenge:
Most marketing reporting still stops at the first conversion. Campaigns are evaluated on immediate ROI: cost per acquisition (CPA), return on ad spend (ROAS), or first-order margin. While useful for short-term decision-making, these metrics overlook a critical truth: not all customers are equal.
Some channels may bring in discount hunters who convert quickly but never return.
Others may attract loyal advocates who buy repeatedly, upgrade to premium products, and refer friends.
Subscription businesses in particular live or die by retention, yet acquisition campaigns are rarely judged on long-term subscriber value.
Without linking acquisition source to downstream behaviour; repeat purchases, churn rates, upsells, referrals, marketers cannot distinguish between high-value and low-value cohorts. This leads to misallocated spend, with budgets flowing toward campaigns that look efficient upfront but erode profitability over time. Finance and leadership then see marketing as a cost centre rather than a growth driver.
The solution:
The answer is to connect acquisition data with revenue over time. By unifying campaign tracking with customer transaction history, businesses can measure true Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) by channel, campaign, and even creative. This involves:
Attribution that persists beyond the first purchase, ensuring the original source of acquisition is tied to all future revenue.
Cohort analysis to compare how customers acquired from different campaigns behave months or years after conversion.
Segmentation by value tiers, so marketers can see which campaigns bring in high-value customers versus one-time buyers.
Armed with this insight, marketers can make smarter budget decisions:
Shifting investment away from “cheap but shallow” channels.
Doubling down on campaigns that generate sticky, profitable customers.
Aligning with finance by demonstrating not just revenue impact, but long-term profitability.
In short, CLV analysis transforms marketing from a short-term acquisition machine into a sustainable growth engine. It moves the conversation from “How many customers did we get this month?” to “How valuable are the customers we’re bringing in, and how do we get more of the best ones?”
Seamless Segmentation
The wish:
“I want to build meaningful audience segments without manually exporting and uploading lists between tools.”
The challenge:
Segmentation should be at the heart of modern marketing, delivering the right message to the right people at the right time. But in practice, building those segments often feels like a chore.
Most teams rely on disconnected systems: customer data sits in the CRM or data warehouse, campaign execution happens in ad platforms and email tools, and analytics lives somewhere else entirely. Creating a new segment typically means:
Pulling raw data from a CRM or database.
Cleaning and formatting it to match the destination tool’s requirements.
Uploading it manually into an ad platform or ESP.
Repeating the whole process every time the audience needs to be refreshed.
This workflow is not only slow and error-prone, it discourages experimentation. Marketers hesitate to test niche segments or micro-campaigns because the operational overhead outweighs the potential upside. Worse still, stale lists mean campaigns often target the wrong people; disengaged customers, churned users, or prospects who no longer fit the criteria.
The solution:
The answer lies in building a central customer data hub that integrates seamlessly with marketing platforms. With this in place:
Data flows automatically from source systems (CRM, product data, transactions) into a unified view of each customer.
No-code segmentation tools allow marketers to define audiences in real time based on demographics, behaviours, or lifecycle stage.
Direct integrations push those audiences instantly into ad platforms, email tools, or personalisation engines, without manual exports.
Continuous syncing keeps segments up to date, so campaigns always target the right people at the right time.
The result is a step-change in agility. Marketers can experiment freely; spinning up a win-back campaign for customers at risk of churn, a loyalty offer for high-value cohorts, or a seasonal promotion for a precise behavioural niche, all in minutes, not days.
Seamless segmentation does not just save time; it unlocks creativity and strategic precision. With the heavy lifting automated, marketing teams can focus on designing experiences that resonate, driving higher engagement, retention, and lifetime value.
A Wish List Within Reach
Attribution you can actually trust.
Ad-level insights that reveal what truly works.
Clarity on customer lifetime value.
Early warning on churn risk.
Segmentation that just works, without manual effort.
At 173tech, we exist to make this wish list real. By combining deep marketing knowledge with data expertise, we help growth teams replace guesswork with evidence, complexity with simplicity, and fragmented reporting with a single source of truth. Because in the end, good data is not about endless dashboards or exports, it is about giving marketers the confidence to invest boldly, create smarter, and grow sustainably.
