Digital marketing spoiled us with measurement. Every click, every view, every conversion is counted and attributed, and the resulting dashboards give a comforting sense of knowing exactly what worked. Against that standard, promotional merchandise looks frustratingly opaque: no clicks, no clean attribution, no dashboard showing which item led to which sale. This apparent unmeasurability is one of the main reasons merchandise loses budget arguments to digital, and it rests on a misunderstanding. Merchandise is harder to measure than digital, but it is not unmeasurable, and giving up on measurement entirely is a mistake.
The realistic position is to measure what genuinely can be measured rather than pretending to a precision that does not exist, and it is the position that Gareth Parkin, founder and CEO of GoPromotional, takes with the businesses the company supplies. The honesty behind it matters more: merchandise will never offer the clean attribution of a tracked link, and any supplier claiming otherwise is overselling. What it does offer is a set of imperfect but genuinely useful signals that, taken together, tell you whether your merchandise is working.
The most direct of these is a trackable response mechanism built into the merchandise itself. A dedicated web address, a specific phone number, a unique discount code, or a QR code that appears only on your branded items creates a measurable path that would not otherwise exist. Not everyone will use it, so it undercounts rather than overcounts, but every response through that channel can be confidently attributed to the merchandise. It converts an untrackable object into a partly trackable one, which is a large improvement over throwing up your hands and declaring the whole thing unmeasurable.
Asking is the second method, disarmingly simple and badly underused. When new enquiries or customers arrive, asking how they came to hear of you, and including merchandise among the options, captures attribution that no automated system could. The data depends on memory and honesty and is therefore imperfect, but gathered consistently over time it reveals real patterns, and those patterns are genuine information. Many businesses already have far more of this insight available to them than they use, simply because they never built the question into their process.
Correlation over time offers a third, more cautious signal. If you distribute a significant quantity of merchandise in a particular period, place, or campaign, and then observe a lift in enquiries, awareness, or sales, that correlation is suggestive even without proving causation. It is most persuasive when the distribution is concentrated enough to stand out from ordinary background noise, and it should always be treated as one signal among several rather than as proof. Used sensibly, though, it adds real weight to a picture built from multiple sources.
There are softer signals worth counting, too, that are informative if you are willing to take them seriously. Reorders are the loudest: a business that buys the same merchandise again has told you, through its own behaviour, that the merchandise did its job. Feedback, mentions from customers, and the simple observation of your items still in use months later are all real evidence of the durable presence merchandise is meant to create. They are qualitative rather than numerical, but qualitative evidence is still evidence, and dismissing it because it lacks a decimal point is its own kind of error.
The principle that makes all of this work is to measure merchandise against the job it was actually hired to do. Merchandise exists to build durable, low-cost presence and lasting brand familiarity, not to generate instant trackable clicks, so judging it by click-through is measuring the wrong thing entirely. Judged by the right proxies, response mechanisms, direct questions, sensible correlation, reorders, and observed longevity, its performance can be assessed honestly and defended on its own terms.
So the practical move is to build a little measurement into your merchandise before you buy rather than wishing for it afterwards: print a trackable response route, add merchandise to your how-did-you-hear question, and pay attention to reorders and real-world sightings. None of it delivers the false precision of a click, but together it gives an honest, defensible read on whether your merchandise is earning its place, which is all any marketing spend can truly ask for. Measured honestly against the job it was hired to do, merchandise holds its own comfortably in any marketing mix, and the businesses that take the trouble to measure it properly are the ones best placed to keep investing in it with confidence.
