Just over a quarter of marketers use a shared language when they talk about effectiveness with the rest of the business. Everyone else is talking past each other.
In Marketing Week's Language of Effectiveness 2026 study, published in June 2026, 71.1% of 636 brand-side marketers said the way marketing interprets effectiveness differs from how the rest of the organisation interprets it. Among B2B marketers specifically, that rises to 75.3%. The same study found something more concrete underneath the disconnect: just over a quarter of respondents said they use a shared language when they talk about effectiveness with the wider business.
Neither side is wrong here. The word "effective" just means two different things depending on who says it.
When a CEO or CFO talks about marketing effectiveness, they usually mean something measurable and near-term: leads, deals closed, cost per acquisition against revenue. When a marketing leader uses the same word, it also covers brand awareness, consideration, search visibility, and everything else that builds toward a result with a delay attached.
Marketing Week's research found that 70% of marketers say their business is focused on effectiveness, but almost two-thirds are still tasked primarily with reporting cost efficiency. When cost efficiency is what leadership asks about every month, it quietly becomes what marketing reports, even when everyone involved knows it doesn't capture the full long-term picture.
We've written about this risk before in our piece on proving marketing's value to leadership: the average B2B buying journey now runs past 190 days and includes more than 60 touchpoints. A single monthly metric was never going to capture that whole path.
The longer and more complex the buying journey, the harder it gets to describe effectiveness with one number. A B2B deal typically involves several decision-makers, stretches over months, and makes it close to impossible to isolate exactly what any single touchpoint contributed to the outcome.
That doesn't mean you give up on attribution. It means that if marketing only reports the numbers that fit neatly into one month's spreadsheet, it's reporting a fraction of its actual impact, and leadership is left assuming the rest doesn't exist.
A typical board-level marketing dashboard covers revenue, lead volume, and customer acquisition cost. It rarely covers search visibility, brand awareness movement, or how much traffic and consideration marketing built before a lead ever appeared in the pipeline.
Neither set of metrics is wrong. The problem is that they're almost never shown side by side, so leadership only ever sees half the story, and marketing never gets to explain the other half in its own terms.
A shared language doesn't come out of a single meeting, but it does come out of deliberate, repeated work:
A shared language around effectiveness isn't a communication nicety. It's a competitive advantage: companies that agree on what "effective" actually means make budget decisions faster and with more confidence than the ones re-explaining their numbers from scratch every quarter. Marketing Week's numbers suggest most companies still have that work ahead of them.
It means marketing and leadership use the same concepts and metrics when discussing whether marketing is working, instead of each side talking in its own way.
Leadership often looks at short-term results from a sales perspective. Marketing also accounts for longer-term effects, like brand awareness and search visibility, that show up in results with a delay.
B2B buying journeys are longer and involve more touchpoints and decision-makers than consumer purchases, which makes it harder to prove the impact of any single action.
By agreeing on a shared definition of effectiveness, reporting short-term and long-term metrics separately but in the same context, and translating marketing's numbers into business language.
It depends on your business goals and the length of your buying journey, which is why building a measurement framework should start with a shared conversation, not a template.
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