Are You Measuring the Right Marketing Metrics?

By Jaci Russo | CEO & Co-Founder, brandRUSSO

Marketing reports have a wonderful ability to make everything look productive.

Impressions are up. Website traffic increased. The company gained followers. Engagement jumped 14 percent. Everyone nods approvingly at the dashboard because there are green arrows pointing upward, and green arrows feel like success.

Then someone asks the slightly inconvenient question: Did any of this actually help the business?

Suddenly, we’re all very interested in the next slide.

The problem isn’t that impressions, clicks, followers, website visits, and engagement don’t matter. They can tell you quite a bit about how people are interacting with your marketing. The problem starts when we confuse activity with progress and assume that because a number increased, the business must be moving in the right direction.

Sometimes it is. Sometimes you’ve simply become extremely successful at generating a number.

A Metric Is Only Useful if You Know Why You’re Measuring It 

Before you decide whether a marketing metric matters, you need to know what you’re trying to accomplish.

If your goal is increasing awareness in a new market, impressions and reach can be useful indicators. If you’re trying to generate qualified leads, website conversions and inquiries probably deserve more attention. If customer retention is the priority, measuring how many new Instagram followers you gained last month may not exactly unlock the mystery.

Yet companies regularly track metrics because the platform provides them, the report has always included them, or somebody once decided they were important and nobody has been brave enough to ask why since.

We end up measuring what’s easy instead of what’s meaningful.

That’s how a marketing team can hit every metric on its dashboard while leadership still wonders why sales haven’t changed.

Vanity Metrics Aren’t Evil 

The phrase “vanity metrics” gets thrown around a lot, usually with the implication that likes, followers, views, and impressions are useless distractions created to make marketers feel good about themselves.

That’s a little unfair.

Those numbers can be useful. If more people are seeing your content, that’s worth knowing. If engagement suddenly drops, that’s worth investigating. If website traffic doubles after a campaign launches, I’d certainly prefer that to nobody showing up.

The trouble comes when those numbers become the finish line.

A post receiving 50,000 views sounds impressive, but what were those views supposed to accomplish? Did the right people see it? Did they remember the company? Did they visit the website? Did they understand what you do? Did they take another step?

If the answer is, “Well, the post got 50,000 views,” we’ve simply returned to the beginning of the conversation with a larger number.

More Traffic Isn’t Always Better Traffic 

Website traffic is another metric that can create a very pleasant chart without necessarily creating a very pleasant sales pipeline.

Let’s say your website traffic increased 40 percent this quarter. Great. Before we start ordering the cake, it might be worth asking who those visitors were and what they did when they arrived.

If you’re a regional B2B manufacturer trying to reach operations leaders and most of that new traffic came from people across the country searching for a completely unrelated term, the traffic increase may not mean much. You attracted more people, but not necessarily more potential customers.

This is where marketing measurement needs context.

The goal isn’t always to get more people through the door. It’s to get more of the right people through the door and give them a reason to stay.

Marketing and Sales Should Be Looking at the Same Story

One of the clearest signs that a company may be measuring the wrong things is when marketing and sales have completely different definitions of success.

Marketing reports that leads are up. Sales says the leads aren’t qualified. Marketing celebrates website traffic. Sales says prospects still don’t understand what the company does. Marketing is pleased with engagement. Sales is wondering whether any of those engaged people have budgets.

Everyone can be technically correct and still have a problem.

Marketing measurement becomes much more useful when it connects to what happens after someone clicks, downloads, subscribes, or fills out a form. Which channels generate qualified opportunities? What content helps prospects move forward? Where are good leads coming from? What messages seem to resonate with the customers you actually want?

Those conversations are far more useful than debating whether 83 likes is good.

Not Everything Valuable Fits Neatly Into a Dashboard 

Here’s where measuring marketing gets a little annoying: some of the things that matter most aren’t always easy to track.

Brand awareness doesn’t always turn into an immediate form submission. Trust doesn’t arrive with a tracking code attached. A prospect may read your content for six months, hear your name from a colleague, see you speak at an event, visit your website three times, and finally call your sales team.

Which touchpoint gets the credit?

Usually whichever software you’re using has a very confident answer, which is adorable.

The reality is that B2B buying decisions can take time and involve multiple interactions. That doesn’t mean measurement is pointless. It means we need to stop pretending every meaningful outcome can be traced perfectly back to a single click.

Good measurement combines data with context. You look at what the numbers are telling you, what customers are telling you, what sales is hearing, and what is happening in the business.

Start With the Business Goal, Then Work Backward 

This is where Focus, the first pillar of our Razor Branding™ process, becomes important. Before you choose tactics or metrics, you need clarity around what you’re actually trying to accomplish and who you’re trying to reach.

If the business needs to enter a new market, your marketing goals should support that. If you need more qualified opportunities from a specific industry, measure whether your marketing is helping create them. If retention matters, pay attention to the experiences and communication that strengthen existing relationships.

Once the goal is clear, you can work backward and identify the behaviors that indicate progress.

That approach sounds obvious, but it requires more discipline than opening a dashboard and reporting whatever numbers happen to be sitting there.

It also makes marketing accountable to something more useful than being busy.

The Takeaway 

The question isn’t whether you’re measuring your marketing. Most companies have more data than they know what to do with, along with several dashboards prepared to prove it.

The better question is whether the things you’re measuring actually tell you anything about the goals you’re trying to achieve.

Likes can matter. Traffic can matter. Impressions can matter. Leads can matter. But none of those numbers means much without understanding who you’re trying to reach, what you want them to do, and how that behavior connects to the business.

So the next time someone presents a marketing report filled with encouraging percentages and cheerful green arrows, take a minute before celebrating.

Ask what changed for the business.

If nobody can answer, you may be measuring the wrong things.

Let’s change the conversation. 

Learn more about our Razor Branding™ process
https://brandrusso.com/razor-branding/

Or complete the market perception scorecard to get a clear read on how your market views you
https://brandrusso.com/mp-scorecard/

To learn more about brandRUSSO, subscribe to our blog , or add the He Said, She Said Branding Podcast to your playlist. 

brandRUSSO was established in 2001 by Jaci and Michael Russo, representing a global portfolio of B2B clients in the professional services and manufacturing industries. As a strategic branding agency, we believe in the promise behind the brand, and that by changing the conversation we can inspire and motivate consumer behavior.