I sat down with Aly Hathcock on her podcast Humans of Growth to unpack a problem every ecommerce marketer eventually runs into - the numbers on your dashboard keep improving, but the business isn't actually growing faster.

How to Track the ROI of Your Digital Marketing: The 2026 Guide to Measuring Real Profit and LTV

In a multi-channel world, a large share of digital ad spend is quietly wasted — misattributed to the wrong campaigns, spent showing the wrong ads to the wrong people. Credible 2026 estimates put programmatic waste around a quarter of spend and studies suggest proper attribution alone recovers roughly 27% of otherwise-wasted budget. However you measure it, the pattern is the same - money leaks when you can't see which campaigns actually drive revenue.

Tracking real ROI is how you stop the leak - spend where it works, cut what doesn't. But doing it accurately is harder than the formulas make it look. This guide covers how to set up ROI tracking for digital campaigns, the common traps, and how to avoid them.

Frustrated by ROI numbers you don't trust? Talk to a Wicked Reports optimization expert.

Three Reasons Cost Per Click Is Costing You Money

Most marketers still judge their ad campaigns on cost per click. It has been best practice forever, and for a long time it was the only number that gave you any quantitative handle on whether your advertising was working. The problem is that the way it has always been done is not the best way, and with CPC it is not even the cheapest one. Optimizing for cost per click quietly costs you money. Here are the three reasons why, and what to measure instead.