How To Measure Marketing Success: Strategies & Metrics
Choose Metrics That Matter: Skip the vanity metrics and focus on what matters to your CEO: revenue and sales. (Top-performing teams are 1.4x more likely to use revenue as a KPI.)
Start with Clear Goals: Turn big marketing goals into specific targets you can actually measure. Instead of "boost awareness," try "get 50 press mentions this quarter."
Use the Right Tools: Build a tech stack that can track everything from first touch to the close.
When Grant Johnson was CMO at Billtrust, his CEO gave him a simple ultimatum: "Grant, if you can prove ROI, we can get you more money."
Grant's situation is a familiar one for marketing leaders, who find themselves caught between growing expectations and the notorious difficulty of measuring marketing's true impact.
Marketing spend is typically one of the largest line items in your P&L—typically ranging from 5-15%—yet only 36% of companies can point to how their marketing efforts impact sales.
The challenge runs deeper than just picking the right metrics. According to a recent Deloitte survey of 800 marketing leaders, 83% plan to switch measurement providers by the end of the year—a clear sign that current approaches aren't working.
The stakes are high: without clear measurement, your marketing budget is vulnerable during downturns, long-term strategies become harder to defend, and your team wastes resources on activities that don’t drive value.
Looking to measure marketing success in ways that show real business impact (and not just vanity metrics)? Read on. Whether you're struggling with attribution in long B2B sales cycles or trying to prove the ROI of brand building, you'll learn how successful companies cut through the complexity to measure what truly matters.
Why Measuring Marketing Success Matters
What makes marketing measurement so crucial? According to Deloitte, marketers' biggest challenge is being able to “translate performance data into actionable insights that improve business and customer value.” Without clear metrics, teams can't identify what's working and what isn't, leading to wasted resources and missed opportunities.
Measurement also helps your marketing team prove its value and defend its budget. As BCG observes, "Marketing can often be painted as a cost center, rather than a profit center. In times of uncertainty when companies face pressure to pull back expenditure or rethink budgets altogether, marketing cost becomes an easy target."
Finally, measurement drives alignment. Jamie Gier, CMO of DexCare, says that the right measurement models help teams "get to a degree of predictability for pipeline and revenue, and that's where sales and marketing are hyper-aligned."
How To Measure Marketing Campaigns
You need a clear plan to measure your marketing effectively. Here's how to build a measurement framework that drives real business impact.
Step 1: Define Your Campaign Goals
Start by thinking big. As Udi Ledergor, Head of Marketing at Gong, puts it:
At the same time, set specific short-term targets. "You need a clear objective of, 'What am I trying to achieve this quarter?'” continues Udi. “I have four very specific goals for this quarter, and almost every single thing I do ties up into one of those four goals."
To bridge the gap between vision and tactics, use structured goal-setting frameworks like SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) or OKRs (Objectives and Key Results). These help make your goals clear and trackable.
For example:
- Instead of "increase leads," try "Achieve a 15% increase in enterprise-level leads over the next three months through targeted LinkedIn campaigns"
- Rather than "improve brand awareness," aim to "generate 50 press mentions in target publications by end of Q2 through thought leadership content"
- Replace "boost engagement" with "Increase email newsletter engagement rate from 22% to 30% by implementing personalized content strategies"
Step 2: Select Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to Track
The best marketing teams focus heavily on metrics that directly tie to business outcomes: they’re 1.4 times more likely to use revenue as a KPI and 2.5 times more likely to track total sales.
High-performing marketing organizations are also more likely than their peers to track brand health, sales and promotion data, supply chain insights, and customer lifetime value.
Important KPIs to measure:
- Pipeline Velocity: How quickly potential customers move through your sales process
- Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs): Tracks leads that meet your ideal customer criteria
- Customer Acquisition Cost: Cost to get each new customer
- Share of Voice: How visible your brand is compared to competitors
- Content Engagement Rate: How people interact with your marketing content
- Customer Lifetime Value: How much revenue each customer brings over time
- Brand Sentiment: What people think about your brand
- Marketing ROI: Measures return on marketing spending
- Campaign Attribution: Identifies which marketing activities lead to sales
- Net Promoter Score: Gauges customer satisfaction and loyalty
Step 3: Set a Campaign Duration and Timeline
Before starting, decide two things: how long your campaign will run and how often you'll check its progress. These decisions affect everything from your budget to how you'll improve the campaign over time.
Different goals require different timeframes:
- Awareness campaigns often need 3-6 months
- Lead generation initiatives might run for 4-8 weeks
- Product launches typically require 8-12 weeks
- Brand building campaigns may go on for 12+ months
When building your timeline, make sure to include pre-launch preparation and post-campaign analysis periods to make sure you’re measuring the full scope of your marketing investment.
Step 4: Schedule Regular Checkpoints to Review Progress
For short-term campaigns, check your results frequently—weekly or daily—so you can quickly build on what's working and fix what isn't.
For longer campaigns, combine weekly performance checks with more detailed monthly reviews. These meetings should do more than just look at marketing metrics (you don't need another unused dashboard). Instead, use them to make real decisions, like moving money to channels that are working better or updating your message based on how your audience is responding.
Match how often you review to how fast your campaign moves. Digital campaigns that change quickly might need daily adjustments, while brand awareness campaigns might work better with thorough monthly reviews.
Step 5: Use the Right Tools to Track Campaign Metrics
Without the right tracking tools, even the best marketing campaigns can miss valuable insights. Modern marketing requires a robust tech stack that can track, analyze, and optimize campaign performance across multiple channels.
Jamie Gier, CMO of DexCare, describes the evolution of her team's measurement toolkit:
This detailed approach to measurement is becoming standard practice. According to Deloitte, high-performing companies are 40% more likely to hire data scientists to help make sense of their marketing data. But even without dedicated analysts, you can build effective measurement systems by choosing and combining the right tools.
Best Marketing Measurement Tools
Finding the right tools for your goals can be challenging. We've researched and tested the best marketing measurement tools to help you show what's driving business growth. Here are the best options to consider:
Step 6: Establish Baselines and Benchmarks
To improve your marketing, you need to understand what good performance looks like. This means looking at two things: your past results (baselines) and industry standards (benchmarks).
Review your previous campaigns to set minimum performance levels for each key metric.
As Grant Johnson, Former CMO of Billtrust, explains:
Keep in mind that you might encounter radically different baselines for different campaigns: "I have some things like a webinar that are 30 to 1. I get $30 for every dollar spent, but you can't just do webinars seven days a week."
If your team is relatively new to the world of marketing measurement, start where you are and build up to more complex measurements over time. According to Gartner, less experienced organizations are often better off starting with simpler aggregate annual metrics, like calculating customer acquisition cost by dividing total spend by customers acquired.
More experienced organizations can use advanced methods like marketing mix modeling to see exactly how each marketing activity contributes to results.
Step 7: Build a Dashboard to Track Results and Share Insights
Your marketing dashboard should be a single source of truth that allows your team to understand how your campaign is doing and make better decisions. But building an effective dashboard requires more than just collecting metrics in one place.
Here's how to build a dashboard that leads to action:
- Think about who will use it:
- Executives need to see overall results and business impact
- Marketing managers need detailed campaign performance
- Channel owners need specific metrics for their areas
- Make it clear and effective:
- Put related metrics together
- Make important information stand out
- Use trend lines to show progress over time
- Add notes to provide context
- Use the right software. Tools like Google Data Studio and Looker Studio make it easy to build and share dashboards, even if you're not technical.
While measuring is important, don't let it stop you from trusting your marketing instincts. As Udi Ledergor, Head of Marketing at Gong says:
Key Metrics For Measuring Marketing Campaign Success
Good data is the foundation of all successful marketing measurement. Let's start with the metrics that matter most to the C-suite: the financial ones.
1. Financial Metrics: ROI, ROAS, and Lifetime Value
Two key financial metrics to watch are your Return on Investment (ROI), which shows your overall profit compared to what you spent, and Return on Ad Spend (ROAS), which specifically tracks how much revenue your advertising dollars generate.
However, using ROI alone won’t show you the full picture, which is why successful marketing teams also look at Customer Lifetime Value (CLV). CLV shows how much revenue a customer will likely generate throughout their entire relationship with your company, helping you make better decisions about how much to spend on getting new customers (and balancing short-term profits against long-term growth).
Key financial metrics to track:
- Return on Investment (ROI): Net profit as a percentage of your total marketing investment
- Return on Ad Spend (ROAS): Revenue generated per dollar spent on advertising
- Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): Expected total revenue from a customer over their entire relationship with you
2. Lead Generation and Acquisition Metrics: Conversion Rate, CPL, and CPA
For B2B companies, understanding how much your lead generation really costs and how well it works is crucial.
Your conversion rate shows how well you're turning interested prospects into actual customers. To manage costs, you'll want to track both Cost Per Lead (CPL) and Cost Per Acquisition (CPA), which tell you how much you're spending to generate each new opportunity.
It's also important to track which marketing channels bring you the best leads, not just the most. For example, paid search might bring lots of leads, but content marketing or speaking events might bring fewer leads that are more likely to become customers.
Key lead generation metrics:
- Conversion Rate: Percentage of visitors or leads who take a desired action (like filling out a form or making a purchase)
- Cost Per Lead (CPL): Total marketing cost divided by the number of leads generated
- Cost Per Acquisition (CPA): Total marketing cost divided by the number of new customers acquired
- Referral Rate: Percentage of new leads that come from existing customer referrals
3. Website and Engagement Metrics: Bounce Rate, Session Duration, and Pageviews
Crucial website metrics include how long people stay (Session Duration), how many pages they look at (Pageviews), and how often they leave right away (Bounce Rate).
When visitors quickly leave your site, it might mean there's a disconnect between what your marketing promises and what people find when they arrive.
Looking at these numbers together tells a fuller story. For example, if a page gets lots of visitors but they don't stay long, your marketing might be attracting the wrong audience. Pages where visitors spend more time might deserve more attention in your campaigns.
Key website engagement metrics:
- Bounce Rate: Percentage of visitors who leave after viewing just one page
- Session Duration: Average time visitors spend on your website per visit
- Pageviews: Total number of pages viewed across all visits
- Average Pages Per Session: Average number of pages viewed before leaving
4. Social Media Metrics: Impressions, Engagement, and Click-Through Rate
Beyond just counting how many people see your posts (Impressions), you'll want to know how many engage with them through likes, shares, and comments (Engagement Rate).
The Click-through Rate shows how often people click your links, helping you understand if your social media presence is driving real business results.
Context matters here. High visibility with low engagement might mean your content isn't connecting with the right audience, while lots of engagement but few clicks could mean your content is entertaining but not driving business goals.
Key social media metrics:
- Impressions: Total times your content is shown to users, whether they interact or not
- Engagement Rate: Percentage of people who interact through likes, comments, shares, or clicks
- Click-Through Rate (CTR): Percentage of people who click your link compared to total views
- Social Share of Voice: Your brand's percentage of industry social media mentions compared to competitors
2 Major Challenges In Measuring Marketing Success In B2B
If measuring marketing success feels harder in B2B SaaS than in other industries, you're not imagining things. The unique characteristics of SaaS businesses—from recurring revenue models to large buying committees—create distinct challenges that traditional measurement approaches weren't designed to handle.
1. Unique Measurement Hurdles in SaaS Marketing
Think about the last time you tried to measure the ROI of a major marketing initiative. Like most B2B marketing leaders, you probably faced some tough questions:
How do you measure marketing's value when customers stay with you for years? How do you track results when your product keeps changing? And with customers upgrading, downgrading, or adding new features throughout their journey, nailing down marketing's impact becomes even more complex.
The technical side is just as challenging. As Deloitte points out, "many companies struggle with data issues such as ensuring quality and hygiene, stitching together data across systems, and meeting global and regional data protection requirements."
For SaaS companies, where every customer interaction creates data, managing and connecting all this information can quickly become overwhelming.
2. Long Sales Cycles and Attribution Complexities
"The B2B buying journey has extended so that the time of the sales cycle is extending, the number of buyers in the buying committee is growing,” says Julia Goebel, CMO of Komodo Health.
The result? Marketing teams need to track and measure an increasingly complex web of customer interactions. Most organizations still struggle to connect these dots effectively.
How do you attribute value when a customer discovers your brand through a LinkedIn post, downloads three whitepapers over six months, attends a webinar, and finally converts after a colleague shares a case study? This challenge—and finding ways to solve it—has become one of the biggest issues facing SaaS marketing leaders today.
Effective Marketing Measurement Models For B2B SaaS
As B2B marketing becomes more complex, we need better ways to measure success. Let's look at different measurement approaches— from basic first-touch attribution to sophisticated marketing mix modeling—and see which might work best for your team.
1. First-Touch vs. Last-Touch Attribution
Many companies start with simple measurement methods. First-touch attribution gives conversion credit to a customer’s first marketing interaction with your brand, while last-touch attribution gives it to the final interaction.
Both approaches can be misleading. For example, if someone sees your TV ad and later clicks a banner ad, last-touch attribution would give all the credit to the banner ad, ignoring how the TV ad first introduced them to your brand.
While these basic methods can help in specific situations (like understanding which channels first attract customers or what finally convinces them to buy), they're usually too simple for B2B SaaS companies.
2. Multi-Touch Attribution
For SaaS companies with complex buying journeys, multi-touch attribution provides a more complete view. Instead of just looking at the final click before purchase, multi-touch attribution helps you understand how each marketing interaction—from the first blog post to the final sales call—contributes to winning new customers.
Multi-touch attribution comes in several types:
- Linear: Gives equal credit to every marketing interaction
- Time-decay: Gives more weight to recent interactions
- Position-based: Focuses on first and last interactions
3. Marketing Mix Modeling
High-performing companies are 2.3 times better at connecting offline sales to digital marketing—crucial for B2B sales. Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) is key to offline-online attribution.
MMM measures how different marketing activities affect sales over time and identifies which combinations of marketing efforts deliver the strongest results.
MMM analyzes key variables including:
- Overall media and advertising data
- External factors like seasonal changes and competitor actions
- Customer purchase and experience information
- Real-time insights and future predictions
Unlike traditional measurement methods, MMM doesn't need personal data or tracking cookies, making it more sustainable as privacy concerns grow.
Creating A Measurement-First Organization
Measuring marketing success isn't about tracking everything—it's about measuring what matters. From choosing the right metrics to using advanced attribution models, there's a lot to consider. But getting measurement right is essential to show marketing's real business value and drive growth.
Fortunately, measurement isn't a solo journey. As Julia Goebel, CMO of Komodo Health, emphasizes, "It's not just one person's job to measure. Socialize the idea of measurement, look at metrics regularly, make it part of regular team meetings and leadership discussions."
By creating a culture that values measurement and using the approaches outlined in this guide, your whole team can help drive marketing success.
Ready to improve your marketing measurement? Check out our guide to marketing attribution, and don’t forget to subscribe to The CMO Club newsletter to get a regular dose of strategic insights designed for marketing leaders.
