Marketers Underinvest in Hard-to-Measure Channels

Publication date: 22.07.2026

Marketers are knowingly underfunding the channels whose impact is hard to measure. In a survey by AppsFlyer and EMARKETER, 58.6% of professionals admit their companies invest too little exactly where reliable metrics are missing — 12.1% are certain of it, and another 46.5% think it likely.

The study, "Mobile-Grade Measurement for the Modern Marketer," polled 157 agency and brand leaders in May 2026. The paradox is simple: the worse a channel measures, the less it gets — even though that is where an undervalued audience may be hiding.

  • the biggest attribution "blind spots" are social media (50.3%) and CTV/streaming (47.1%);
  • the lowest measurement confidence goes to Connected TV (3.1 out of 5);
  • the main barriers are siloed data across channels (36.3%) and a lack of clean first-party data (26.1%);
  • 49.7% apply AI recommendations without manual review less than half the time.

According to PPC Land, companies waste at least 11% of media budgets on unverified optimization signals, while the channels underfunded today could gain 5.6% more spend over the next year or two.

What to do about it. The problem is not that a channel is bad — it is that analytics can't see it. Before cutting the budget for the "unmeasurable," it is worth doing three things: bring channel data into one system instead of judging each in isolation; set up clean first-party data and shared metric definitions; and stop handing budget allocation to AI blindly — review its recommendations by hand.

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