5 Metrics That Matter The Most In Marketing Analytics
- marqeu
- Feb 24
- 6 min read
Updated: Jul 23
As marketing execution in 2025 gets into full swing, marketing analytics and AI capabilities continue to be the top priorities for organizations across various industries. The landscape of marketing is evolving rapidly, and with it, the strategies and tools that marketers employ to ensure their efforts are not only effective but also measurable. In this new era, the focus is on leveraging analytics to drive informed decision-making and optimize marketing performance.
To drive long-term success in such a competitive environment, marketers are now adopting the mind-set of a Chief Financial Officer (CFO).
This shift is significant as it establishes marketing as not just a creative endeavor but as a critical driver of value and a revenue-generating function within the organization. With the rise of digital platforms, AI and the increasing availability of data, expectations have changed dramatically.
The CMOs and marketing leaders who are adapting to this new marketing paradigm powered by advanced marketing analytics capabilities are leading the charge to transform their organizations into data-centric entities that prioritize measurable outcomes.
These leaders recognize the importance of integrating analytics into every facet of their marketing strategy, ensuring that every campaign is not only creative but also backed by solid data and insights. This transformation requires a cultural shift within organizations, where marketing is seen as a strategic partner rather than a support function. Such modern marketers incorporate analytics rigor as well as a revenue mindset for every decision they make. They actively seek to understand the impact of their marketing efforts on the bottom line, demonstrating that marketing led by a growth mindset is accountable for driving top-line revenue. This accountability is crucial in an era where stakeholders demand transparency and results.
Marketing Analytics teams play a pivotal role in the intricate process of collecting, analyzing, and interpreting vast amounts of data to provide actionable insights that can significantly guide and enhance marketing strategies. In today's fast-paced and data-driven environment, the ability to make informed decisions based on solid analytical findings is not just beneficial; it is essential for survival and success.
To navigate this complex landscape effectively, we have meticulously compiled the details of the 5 metrics that matter the most in marketing analytics.
These metrics are not just numbers; they are critical indicators that offer profound insights into the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and the overall return on investment (ROI).
Understanding these key performance indicators (KPIs) is crucial for marketing teams as they assess their initiatives and strive to optimize their strategies. By focusing on these essential metrics, marketing teams can gain a clearer picture of their performance, identify areas for improvement, and ultimately contribute to the growth and sustainability of their organizations. This is particularly important in an increasingly competitive landscape where data-driven decision-making is paramount.
The most common ask from the marketing leaders these days is to demonstrate the quantifiable impact that their organizations are making on the pipeline. Given the growing scrutiny around marketing budgets and the asks for returns from the marketing spend,
marketing performance insights and marketing analytics not only empower marketing leaders to have data-driven conversations with the c-suite, inspire/reward their teams based on performance but also optimize the execution of their strategy.
As the importance of marketing analytics continues to grow, the number of metrics that are available for marketing teams to track is growing exponentially as well. Whether it is digital marketing, ABM, partner marketing, demand generation, events/field marketing,
every marketing organization has a set of “Strategic Metrics” (with different definitions, unique to how a company operates) that it tracks to measure performance. Combination of such metrics makes up the key levers that they can pull to accelerate the performance and understand what is working.
Across all our marketing analytics engagements at marqeu, we have been building marketing BI, data warehousing infrastructure (using popular tools like Amazon Redshift, BigQuery, Snowflake, DBT, Prefect, Python, MySQL, Periscope, Looker, Tableau, DOMO, PowerBI) and self serve dashboards that enable tracking of these metrics on an on-going basis.
Though the definitions of such metrics vary there are 5 broad categories of metrics that define #MarketingAnalytics and #ROI.
New Engagements – Volume and Quality: To impact new deals, it's essential to engage the right customers and accounts, actively qualify them, and nurture them before passing them to sales. Goals are crucial for motivating marketing teams to create ambitious plans to drive these engagements. To ensure marketers have real-time insight into performance relative to goals, we have developed a framework to monitor actual results against targets.
Cohort-Based Demand Waterfall Conversions: Although new engagements aim to increase top-of-the-funnel volumes, it is the "cohort-based" demand waterfall conversions that assess the quality of these engagements. Demand Waterfall conversions typically monitor four key performance indicators (KPIs), albeit with some variations: Leads to MQLs, MQLs to SALs, SALs to SQLs, and SQLs to Deals. These four KPIs offer insights into the funnel's efficiency and assist in speeding up deal closures.
Influenced and Sourced Pipeline: Generating a new pipeline has always been the top KPI for any marketing team. Recently, the need to show how marketing influences the pipeline has significantly increased. Two key metrics used to demonstrate marketing's impact are Marketing Pipeline Acceleration/Influence and New Pipeline Sourcing. These metrics help organizations measure marketing-driven engagement across accounts and connect it to pipeline impact. By analyzing these correlations, valuable insights are gained about when new opportunities were created in marketing-engaged accounts and how marketing influenced deal expansions and accelerated closures in accounts with existing opportunities. These KPIs form a basis for marketing leaders to engage in meaningful discussions with their sales counterparts. Additionally, they play a crucial role in assessing the market mix across various marketing tactics and channels during different stages of the buying cycle.
Multi-Touch Attribution: In today's world, organizations employ a wide range of marketing tactics and channels to connect with customers. Each deal, particularly in the enterprise sector, involves numerous marketing interactions, from web engagement (such as visits and clicks) to email engagement, webinars, e-books, white papers, and in-person events, among others. Although these interactions vary in their impact on deals, they all require funding from a limited marketing budget. It is unreasonable for marketing leaders to allocate budgets to different tactics without insights into their performance. The era when marketers could base budget allocations solely on intuition is over. Finance and sales departments expect marketing leaders to make informed budget decisions. Within marketing organizations, leaders increasingly seek confidence in these decisions, as they are crucial to achieving pipeline goals. This is where multi-touch campaign attribution becomes essential, serving as the most valuable KPI. It informs marketing investment decisions, which in turn drive organizational results. Whether using First Touch, Last Touch, Multi-Touch, Equal Weight Multi-Touch, or a Weighted approach to marketing attribution, when these methods are correctly implemented and validated, they provide invaluable insights for the marketing organization.
Customer Life Time Value (LTV): This metric is gaining popularity among SaaS companies and is being scrutinized more for long-term Marketing ROI assessments. It represents the total revenue anticipated from new customers over their lifetime. Since the likelihood of generating additional revenue from an existing customer is nearly three times higher than from a new one, effectively managing customer churn is crucial for increasing LTV and achieving higher ROI.
Modern marketing technology and analytics platforms have made it easy to actively track marketing spend (building budget tracking apps within the CRM platform instead of buying additional tools), engagement with the marketing programs and the pipeline associated with those engagements. With the right analytics strategy and tools, we work with marketing leaders to empower their teams with these critical data points so that each team member can actively contribute towards fostering a data-driven culture within the organization. These KPIs provide strategic insights to the marketing leaders and CMOs so that they can confidently demonstrate the impact that their organizations are making and help foster a strong working relationship for marketing within the c-suite, especially with the CFOs.
We are always on the lookout for inputs and examples from the marketing community to keep adding value for our customers. We welcome the inputs from other leaders and practitioners around growth the key metrics that leaders are using to demonstrate the impact marketing is making at your organization? What kind of questions do they get from the sales teams? What data points around marketing performance are shared with the c-suite?
Let’s discuss how marketing analytics can transform your marketing strategy and make it a cornerstone of your marketing success. Reach out today, and let’s build your next big win together!
With our marketing analytics consulting services, let us evaluate your current stack and give you a roadmap to advanced marketing analytics capabilities.
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