As we move into 2026, the world of digital marketing is entering yet another period of intense transformation. Browser restrictions, disappearing cookies, tightening privacy controls, and increasingly complex consent standards have created a landscape where customer journeys are less complete, audience quality is less reliable, and optimisation systems receive fewer meaningful signals. At the same time, expectations for personalisation have never been higher, and AI continues to advance at a remarkable pace.
The challenge for brands is not merely to keep up with this changing environment, but to build systems and practices resilient enough to thrive in it. As Aymen Tabbakha, Data and Tech Partner Manager at Google, says, “AI doesn’t replace the need for data, it amplifies it. If your data is weak, your AI will be weak too.”
To help brands navigate this shift, Merkle has defined a practical three-pillar framework for building sustainable marketing performance. These pillars: data strength, data activation, and proving true business impact represent the foundation of modern, future-ready marketing.
The Evolving Digital Landscape
At the heart of today’s challenge is signal loss. As traditional tracking erodes and user behaviour becomes more fragmented across devices, platforms, and consent states, the visibility marketers once relied upon is no longer guaranteed. Conversion paths appear incomplete, performance platforms struggle to optimise intelligently, and attribution systems lose the clarity they once provided.
Yet the picture is not all bleak. Brands that invest in their data, embrace cloud-first integration and adopt modern measurement approaches are beginning to unlock competitive advantage. Strengthening your data is no longer an optional exercise, it is a strategic imperative.
Pillar One: Building Data Strength
Data strength forms the backbone of the entire framework. Without it, every downstream capability, from audience targeting to AI-driven bidding, operates at a disadvantage. Strong data begins with integrated systems, consistent identifiers, high-quality event structures and governance that prevents drift and decay.
A critical step is fully integrating GA4 with BigQuery. This connection allows organisations to move beyond the limitations of the GA4 interface and into the world of raw event-level data, where they can join analytics with CRM, transactional and media data. This, in turn, enables more accurate reporting, bespoke journey analysis, and advanced modeling that aligns to actual business outcomes.
A second essential component is establishing a consistent user ID strategy. In a world where cross-device journeys are fragmented, having a stable, anonymised identifier helps reconcile user activity and significantly improves both reporting accuracy and audience building.
Clear taxonomy naming conventions are equally important. GA4’s flexibility is powerful, but this power quickly becomes chaotic without a unifying taxonomy. When events follow a shared structure, teams across analytics, product, and media can work from the same reference point, ensuring clarity and maintaining the integrity of downstream pipelines.
Alongside this sits the need for up-to-date ad tech configurations. Enhanced Conversions, Consent Mode, and the Google Tag Gateway are no longer “nice to haves”; they are essential for preserving signal flow and recovering measurement lost to privacy changes.
Strong governance underpins all of this. Automated data quality checks, defined data ownership, and robust security practices help ensure that data remains trustworthy over time. As Charlie Billingham, Analytics Director, summarised, “You can’t activate what you can’t trust. Data quality isn’t glamorous, but it’s the quiet superpower of high-performing marketing teams.”
Data strength, then, is not a single project but a discipline; one that enables every subsequent stage of the marketing lifecycle.
Pillar Two: Activating Your Data
Once the foundation is established, the next step is activation: the process of turning clean, connected data into meaningful customer engagement and commercial performance. Activation begins with advanced audience creation. By using behavioural patterns, lifecycle signals, and historical value data, brands can move far beyond simple remarketing lists and instead create nuanced, predictive segments that inform both paid media and on-site personalisation.
But audience quality alone is not enough. True activation requires integration across the wider ecosystem. When GA4 is linked effectively with Google Ads, DV360, CRM systems, and cloud infrastructure, organisations can build fluid pathways for insight to inform activation and for activation to feed back into insight. This two-way connectivity enables everything from lifecycle-driven engagement strategies to automated ingestion of high-value conversion signals for bidding optimisation.
Activation is also about generating meaningful insight. GA4 data can reveal friction in user journeys, highlight underperforming content, expose product opportunities or inform CRO strategies. These insights become more powerful when shared across teams. Marketers, product managers, analysts, and CRM teams all benefit when analytics moves from isolated reporting to collaborative decision-making.
AI represents the next frontier of activation. With tools such as Google Cloud and Vertex AI, brands can begin building predictive models, including propensity scores, churn likelihood, and lifetime value indicators, that transform raw data into actionable intelligence. Even small use cases can generate significant value when predictions are pushed into ad platforms or into onsite experiences. AI isn’t about replacing creativity or strategy; it’s about removing the guesswork. It helps you spend where the value really is.
Ultimately, activation is a continuous cycle: data feeds models, models inform targeting, targeting produces new signals, and those signals enrich the data once again.
Pillar Three: Proving True Business Impact
The final pillar is where modern measurement comes into focus. With last-click attribution increasingly unreliable, marketing effectiveness must be assessed through models and frameworks that reflect real commercial contribution rather than platform-reported convenience metrics.
A strong KPI framework is essential here. Rather than anchoring performance to clicks or impressions, organisations need a hierarchy of metrics that ladder up to revenue, margin and long-term value. Clean, well-structured data from the first two pillars becomes the fuel that enables cross-channel reporting with clarity and consistency.
Incrementality testing plays a crucial role in this pillar, providing empirical evidence of uplift that goes beyond what attribution alone can offer. Advanced techniques such as media mix modelling (MMM) and data-driven attribution help create a more accurate picture of how channels interact and contribute to business outcomes. The intention is not to produce a single “perfect” model, but rather to triangulate multiple sources of truth to inform smarter investment decisions.
Equally important is accessibility. Measurement insight must be available to stakeholders across the organisation, not locked away in analytical teams. When commercial, product and marketing teams can see the same story, alignment becomes easier and strategy becomes more coherent. Measurement is no longer about reporting what happened, it’s about proving why it happened and whether it mattered.
This pillar completes the loop: the stronger your data and activation, the more confidently you can attribute value, and the more effectively you can optimise future investment.
What Marketers Is What You Should Do Next
To prepare for the opportunities and challenges of 2026, marketers should focus on three interconnected priorities.
Strengthen the data foundation: integrate GA4 with BigQuery, establish user IDs, adopt modern tagging solutions, and embed a consistent event taxonomy.
Activate data in ways that influence real customer experiences through advanced audiences, platform integration, and early-stage AI use cases.
Adopt modern measurement approaches that demonstrate marketing’s true contribution to business growth.
To assist businesses in achieving these priorities, Merkle has built The 2026 Marketing Playbook, filled with practical and achievable steps, wherever your team is in their data journey.
Much of this thinking was shared during our recent Merkle x Google webinar, but the framework stands alone as a practical roadmap for any organisation. Brands that invest now in their data, their activation capabilities and their measurement frameworks will be those that deliver smarter, more sustainable growth in 2026 and beyond.
If you’d like support in assessing your analytics maturity or building your 2026 roadmap, we’re here to help!
