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One fifth of B2B Marketers say their biggest challenge is proving the effectiveness of their activity to the wider business. Your digital marketing metrics need to translate into meaningful business outcomes for senior management, and that means proving its ROI. If your digital campaigns are successful lead generators, then make sure you shout about it!
It’s time to get rid of the digital headache. Here are some of the top B2B marketing metrics that experts measure, and why you should too…
Conversion rate
What it measures: Conversion rate is a B2B marketing metric that measures how many of the people you reached – whether contacted directly or exposed to an ad or landing page – went on to take the action you wanted, such as filling out a form or becoming a lead.
How to calculate it: Conversion Rate = (Total number of conversions / Total number of people reached) x 100%
If you want to generate the best return possible, you’re going to have to understand how your conversion at each stage of the sales funnel affects your ROI. And if you focus on conversion rate optimisation, you can maximise your return by nudging more people to take the desired action.
If you always remember to forecast conversion performance before you invest another penny in online marketing activity, then you definitely won’t be caught out further along the line.
Customer acquisition cost (CAC)
What it measures: Customer acquisition cost measures how much it’s costing you to get a new customer.
How to calculate it: Customer acquisition cost = Total amount you spent on acquiring customers / Number of new customers you acquired from those activities
With paid advertising activity in particular, you have two variables you can change: your message and your bids. Our guide to performance marketing KPIs and software covers the metrics that show whether those changes are working. Keeping a close eye on cost metrics further through the funnel will make sure you don’t end up with lots of top-of-funnel vanity traffic, but negative ROI at the bottom (uh-oh).
Cost per lead (CPL)
What it measures: Cost per lead measures how much you’re spending on each lead you bring into the business.
How to calculate it: Cost per lead = Total marketing spend / Total new leads
Customer lifetime value (CLV)
What it measures: Customer lifetime value shows you how much your average customer will spend with you throughout their customer lifespan.
How to calculate it: Customer lifetime value = Average purchase value x Average purchase frequency x Average customer lifespan
Customer lifetime value (CLV) : Customer acquisition cost (CAC) ratio
What it measures: Your CLV:CAC ratio demonstrates the true value of a customer, taking into account the spend it took to acquire that customer in the first place.
How to calculate it: CLV:CAC ratio = Average customer lifetime value / Customer acquisition cost
Bounce rate
What it measures: Bounce rate shows you how many website visitors are leaving your site without clicking onto another page.
A high bounce rate can mean a lot of things, but common causes are a lack of a strong call to action, your visitors not finding what they’re looking for, or your site loading too slowly.
How to calculate it: Many analytics platforms will calculate your bounce rate for you, but to calculate it manually, divide the number of single-page sessions by the number of total sessions on the site.
Lead-to-customer conversion rate
What it measures: The lead-to-sale conversion rate measures your effectiveness in converting a lead into a paying customer. Where conversion rate (above) tracks people becoming leads, this metric tracks leads becoming revenue.
How to calculate it: Lead-to-sale conversion rate = (Converted leads / Total lead volume) x 100%
Multi-touch attribution
What it measures: Multi-touch attribution assigns credit for a closed deal across every marketing touchpoint a buyer had before they converted, rather than crediting one single moment. It exists because marketing and sales usually disagree about which campaign, channel, or conversation actually won the deal – and that disagreement is hard to settle without a model.
First-touch attribution gives 100% of the credit to the first interaction a buyer had with your brand, such as an organic search visit or a paid ad click. It’s simple to set up and good for understanding what drives initial awareness, but it ignores everything that happened afterward.
Last-touch attribution gives 100% of the credit to the final touchpoint before conversion, usually a demo request or a sales call booking. It’s the easiest model to track and the most common default in CRM reporting, but it overvalues bottom-of-funnel activity and hides what actually built the pipeline in the first place.
Multi-touch (or multi-channel) attribution splits credit across several touchpoints along the buyer’s journey – evenly (linear), weighted toward the first and last interaction (U-shaped), or weighted toward the touchpoints closest to conversion (time-decay). It takes more setup and cleaner tracking, but it’s the only model that reflects how most B2B buying cycles actually work: several touches, over weeks or months, across more than one channel.
How to calculate it: There isn’t a single formula, since the model you choose determines how credit is split. What matters more than the formula is picking one model and applying it consistently, so your reporting across quarters is comparable.
“We see a lot of companies that separate marketing and sales, and align them separately […] The best things we see is when marketing and sales have their own separate KPIs, and they’re working with each other, but also on their own separate things.”— Owen Cole, Paragon Marketing Projects
That’s the practical argument for attribution: it gives marketing and sales a shared, agreed-upon picture of what’s working, even when each team is still measured on its own separate KPIs.
Unengaged subscriber rate
What it measures: Unengaged subscriber rate measures how many contacts in your email campaign aren’t engaging with your content – what this means specifically can vary based on what you consider engagement – for some it might mean just opening an email, for others it might be clicking on a call to action.
Whatever it means for you, it’s in your best interest to trim the fat and get rid of contacts who clearly either aren’t interested or even aren’t receiving your emails at all. Having a smaller mailing list but a higher percentage of engaged contacts will be healthier overall for your deliverability rates.
How to calculate it: Unengaged subscriber rate = (Unengaged subscribers / Total subscribers) x 100%
MQL to SQL ratio
An MQL, or marketing qualified lead, is a potential customer that your marketing team has deemed a good fit for the business. An SQL (sales qualified lead) is an opportunity further down the sales funnel and has been identified as a good fit by your sales team, and has an intent to buy.
What it measures: MQL to SQL ratio measures how many MQLs are progressing to SQLs.
How to calculate it: MQL:SQL ratio = Number of MQLs : Number of SQLs
Net promoter score
What it measures: NPS, or net promoter score, measures how likely your customers are to recommend you to someone.
If your business isn’t already conducting NPS surveys, you can either collect responses on your site or via email surveys, and simply ask your customers: how likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?
How to calculate it: Net promoter score = Percentage of promoters (scored you 9 or 10) − Percentage of detractors (scored you 0-6)
NPS is really useful, but it’s backward-looking. For a forward-looking take on measuring trust itself, see who B2B buyers actually trust, and why NPS alone doesn’t capture it.
Leads Generated
What it measures: Obviously one of the most important things to track is how many leads your marketing activity is generating! This will give you a grasp of how effective your marketing efforts are and if you need to make any adjustments.
How to calculate it: Leads Generated = total count of new leads captured over a given period (weekly, monthly, or quarterly), broken down by source so you can see which channels are actually contributing.
If you’d like to increase the number of leads you generate from interested prospects, you should definitely consider using Lead Forensics. The software identifies prospects that are on your site, enabling you to add them to your marketing automation sequence or handing them over to your sales team to follow up.
B2B Marketing Metrics FAQs
Why these metrics over other ones you could track?
Every metric in this list ties back to a decision you can actually act on: whether to keep spending on a channel, whether your funnel is leaking at a specific stage, or whether a lead is worth sales time. A metric that doesn’t change a decision is a vanity metric, however impressive it looks on a dashboard.
“It’s all numbers and metrics driven, but sometimes you’re driving your team towards the wrong thing […] I may not have always had the biggest pipeline or the most leads, but I had the right ones.”— Tom Happe, TrueLeads
Which of these metrics matter most early on vs. later in the funnel?
Early funnel: cost per lead, bounce rate, and unengaged subscriber rate tell you whether your top-of-funnel activity is reaching the right people. Mid-funnel: MQL:SQL ratio and lead-to-customer conversion rate tell you whether marketing is handing sales anything worth working. Late funnel and beyond: CAC, CLV, and CLV:CAC ratio tell you whether the whole exercise is actually profitable.
How many of these should a small marketing team realistically track?
Start with conversion rate, cost per lead, and CLV:CAC ratio. Those three alone will surface most funnel and spend problems. Add multi-touch attribution and MQL:SQL ratio once you have enough volume and clean enough data for either to be reliable – both become noisy, not useful, on small sample sizes.
What’s the single biggest mistake teams make when reporting on these metrics?
Reporting a metric without the decision it’s meant to inform. A bounce rate or an NPS score in isolation tells a stakeholder nothing about what to do next – pair every number with the action it should trigger if it moves in the wrong direction.
