We know clicks are not impact. We report them anyway
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- Tendencias y Futuro
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There is a conversation that happens, with remarkable regularity, in organisations that take communication seriously.
Someone asks whether the last campaign worked. Someone else pulls up the dashboard. Opens: 42%. Click rate: 6.3%. Attendance at the town hall: 78 people.
The numbers are presented. The meeting moves on.
Nobody asks the question that actually matters: did anything change because of this?
That question rarely appears in communication reports because impact is hard to isolate, difficult to attribute and uncomfortable to defend in front of a leadership team that wants clean numbers and clear causality. So we report what we can control. And we have been doing it long enough that it has started to look like rigour.
The metrics we choose reveal what we believe about ourselves
There is something worth naming about why clicks and opens persist as the default currency of communication reporting. It is not ignorance. Most communicators know perfectly well that an open rate does not tell you whether anyone understood the message, let alone whether it changed anything.
The reason these metrics survive is simpler and more uncomfortable: they are defensible. They are produced by the systems we already have. They do not require access to data that sits in other functions. And they do not force a conversation about whether communication actually moved anything, which is a conversation that can go badly.
In a Linkedin post Ruxandra-Laura Bosilca said she recently surveyed 67 communication leaders across 15 countries and found that the challenge that came up most consistently was not resources, not access, not headcount. It was proving the impact of their work. That finding matters. It suggests the measurement problem is waiting for a different relationship with the organisation.
What we should actually be measuring
AMEC, the international measurement body for communication, has long argued for a framework that distinguishes between four levels: what was produced, what audiences actually received and understood, what changed in their attitudes or behaviour, and what changed for the organisation as a result.
Most communication reporting lives entirely in the first level. Pieces published. Emails sent. Events held. Reach achieved. These things matter, but they describe activity. They do not describe change.
The levels that actually connect communication to organisational value are the ones that ask harder questions. Did employees understand the new strategy well enough to act on it, or did they receive it and move on? Did the stakeholders we were trying to reach shift how they think about this organisation, or did we reach them and leave no impression? Did the transformation we supported get adopted, or did we communicate around it without it landing?
Those questions require different data than an open rate provides. They require surveys, qualitative research, behavioural signals, longitudinal tracking of trust and perception. None of that is technically difficult. What it requires is the organisational decision that communication impact is worth measuring properly, which is a decision that communication teams rarely get to make alone.
The language leadership actually understands
This is where the measurement conversation quietly becomes something else.
A CFO is not thinking about communication. They are thinking about the cost of a transformation that is taking twice as long as planned because people do not understand what is being asked of them. A CEO is not thinking about engagement rates. They are thinking about why the organisation keeps announcing strategies that do not translate into changed behaviour at the levels that would make a difference.
These are communication problems. But they are not described in communication language, which is part of why communication often arrives late to the conversation about solving them.
When an organisation’s transformation adoption is slower than expected, the question that matters is not whether enough messages were sent. It is whether people understood what was expected of them, why it mattered and what specifically needed to change in their day-to-day work. Measuring that, and connecting it to adoption data, is how communication earns its place in a business conversation rather than a communication review.
When a company struggles to attract the talent it needs, clicks on a careers page tell you almost nothing useful. What matters is how the organisation is perceived as a place to work by the specific people it is trying to hire, and whether that perception reflects reality. That is a measurement question, but it is also a strategic one.
The pattern is consistent. The metric that matters in each case is a business outcome that communication can influence, and the job of measurement is to make that influence visible.
A more honest framework for reporting
Rather than a dashboard of activity, what actually helps leadership understand the value of communication is evidence structured around a few core questions.
What were we trying to change, and in whom? A specific shift in understanding, attitude or behaviour in a defined audience. Starting here forces precision that most communication planning skips.
What signals would tell us the change was happening? Evidence of movement: comprehension measures, sentiment shifts, behavioural indicators, trust tracked over time. These need to be defined before the communication starts, not retrofitted after.
What did we actually find, and what does it mean for what we do next? This is the question most reports avoid. Because answering it honestly sometimes means the communication did not work, or worked differently than expected, or reached the wrong people. Being prepared to surface that finding, and act on it, is what separates a measurement practice from a reporting exercise.
None of this requires sophisticated technology. It requires the function to be involved early enough to define what success looks like, and trusted enough by leadership to deliver findings that are not always convenient.
The measurement problem is a positioning problem
The organisations where communication is measured properly are, in my experience, the ones where communication has been given, or has earned, a seat early enough in the decision-making process to define what it is trying to achieve before it starts.
That positioning is not given. It is built over time, through the quality of the questions the function asks, the rigour of the evidence it provides, and its willingness to say when something is not working rather than only when it is.
The dashboard that shows clicks and opens is a symptom of a function that has not yet made the case for being measured differently.
Making that case is not primarily a technical challenge. It is a strategic one. And it starts with a better question: what does this organisation need to understand, believe or do differently, and how would we know if that happened?
Voices referenced: Ruxandra-Laura Bosilca / AMEC Barcelona Principles