Back in the day, measuring marketing performance seemed pretty simple. Pre-internet, you worked out a benchmark when you were not advertising compared to when you were.
Then, a little thing called the Internet came along, and all hell broke loose. We were suddenly deluged with terms like CPA, CPC, ROAS, and a barrage of others we quickly had to catch up with.
This influx of data has, of course, been a blessing, allowing us to make more informed decisions about how and where we invest our money.
However, in the case of B2B, where sales cycles can be long and not all leads are created equal, how can you ensure that you’re measuring your success in a way that properly aligns with your business objectives?We uncover the best ways to measure and optimise your digital campaign success.
Identifying the right metrics for your business
Every business is different, so what metrics work for you may differ from another organisation.
For example, if you’re a business that sells specific products or services at a specific cost with a short sales cycle, measuring return on investment can be fairly straightforward.
However, for businesses where clients may take a longer time to “sign on the dotted line” or where customer value differs, you may need to put more thought into what activities you want to measure.
Common performance marketing goals include:
Average Order Value (AOV)
For B2B businesses that sell a product or singular transactional service, average order value can be a helpful metric.
Calculating your AOV is straightforward: take your total order value over the last 12 months (excluding any anomalies) and divide it by the number of orders.
A higher AOV often indicates successful upselling or cross-selling strategies.
Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)
A measure of the total revenue a customer is expected to generate during their relationship with your business.
This metric is vital for businesses that offer ongoing services, as it helps provide an average value for each customer over time.
Unlike a singular transaction, the return on investment for these businesses comes from sustained revenue streams over the customer’s lifecycle.
Cost per Lead (CPL)
The amount spend to acquire a single lead. This metric helps evaluate the efficiency of your campaigns and whether your spending aligns with your budget and expected returns.
Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) vs Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs)
MQLs are leads that have shown interest in your business through actions like downloading a whitepaper or attending a webinar. They indicate potential interest but may not yet be ready for direct sales engagement.
SQLs, on the other hand, have been vetted by the sales team and meet specific criteria that make them ready for sales outreach. Tracking both MQLs and SQLs helps you understand the effectiveness of your marketing efforts and how well they are converting leads into actionable opportunities.
Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)
ROAS means the revenue generated for every pound spent on advertising. For example, if you spend £5000 and generate £10,000, you will have a ROAS of 2,
For B2B businesses that sell products, ROAS can be a helpful metric and measures the revenue generated for every pound spent on advertising. However, it’s essential to be mindful that while ROAS is a short-term metric, if you focus only on bottom-of-funnel activity that generates instant results, you may fall short later down the line if the pipeline is not filled at the top of the funnel.
Marketing Efficiency Ratio (MER)
A holistic metric that evaluates the total revenue generated by your marketing efforts divided by the total marketing spend. Unlike ROAS, which focuses on specific campaigns, MER provides a broader view of how effectively your overall marketing investment is driving results.
Before starting your campaigns, it’s important to define the metrics that are important to your business and ensure that all stakeholders are aligned to avoid confusion later down the line.
Additionally, understand how and when you are going to measure these metrics. This is particularly important when you have longer sales cycles, as ROAS measured on, say, a monthly basis may not give an accurate picture if it takes six months to make a sale. So, agree on a realistic timeframe and methodology for evaluating performance.
Measuring your conversions
As a B2B organisation, you may want to measure conversion rate at a number of different points.
Website conversion rate:
This is the number of visitors to your site vs how many make an enquiry. It’s like that this may differ depending on how they reached your website. For example, if you are running a Google Ads campaign, you would expect a higher conversion rate than from visits from organic traffic to an informational blog.
MQL to SQL
This measures the percentage of MQLs that turn into sales-qualified leads. For instance, if someone downloads a whitepaper and then engages with follow-up emails, how many progress to a sales call?
Enquiry to Purchase
This is the final stage – how many of your enquiries become customers?
Understanding that each of these stages will have a different conversion rate is crucial for identifying optimisation opportunities across your sales funnel.
Tracking performance across the sales funnel
Quite often, B2B sales processes can be lengthy and sometimes complex, with potential customers dealing with different parts of the business through the sales cycle. Therefore, you may find it useful to break down your metrics by the stage of the sales funnel they represent or by the part of your organisation responsible for that stage (e.g., marketing, sales, or product teams).
An easy way to break down your metrics to easily identify bottlenecks or opportunities is to set metrics to examine at each stage
Top of Funnel (Awareness)
This is the earliest stage in a sales cycle, where a buyer moves from being unaware of your brand to recognising it. Metrics worth tracking here include impressions, clicks, website visits, social media engagement, or impressions on search engine results pages (SERPs). At this stage, you primarily measure your initial reach and how the audience responds to the content you are “pushing” out.
Middle of Funnel (Consideration)
This is where a buyer is starting to examine their options. Performance marketing metrics worth measuring at the middle of the funnel are usually more engagement-based. These include what users do when they visit your site: Are they spending a reasonable amount of time on the site? Are they engaging with downloadable resources such as case studies or whitepapers? Metrics such as session duration, page depth, and form completions provide insights into their level of interest and intent.
Bottom of Funnel (Descision)
This is where a potential customer is tipped to purchase. At this stage, focus on conversion metrics such as form submissions, moving from an MQL to an SQL and, of course, if you sell directly online - purchasing. These metrics provide clear insights into how effectively your efforts are converting interest into sales.
The importance of attribution
Attribution models are frameworks that assign credit to the various marketing channels and touchpoints that contribute to a conversion. These models help you determine which efforts are driving results and which may need optimisation. Understanding attribution models is particularly important in B2B performance marketing, where sales cycles are longer and involve multiple interactions across different channels.
Common attribution models include:
• First-Click Attribution: Gives full credit to the first interaction. This model is useful for understanding which channels are most effective at creating initial awareness.
• Last-Click Attribution: Assigns all credit to the final interaction before conversion. This model highlights the channels that directly lead to a purchase or conversion.
• Multi-Touch Attribution:
Distributes credit across all touchpoints in the customer journey. This model provides a more holistic view of how various channels and interactions contribute to the overall success of your marketing efforts.
Why Attribution Models Matter in B2B
In B2B performance marketing, buyers often interact with your brand multiple times before making a decision.
For example:
• An assistant may have been tasked with finding a new IT provider, so they start on Google and see your advert. They go to the landing page and bookmark your website for later.
• They then put their shortlist to the decision maker, who visits your website directly through the link.
• While finalising their list, they see a retargeting ad on LinkedIn offering an enticing deal and click on it.
• Finally, they will get in touch via the phone number listed on your Google My Business profile.
As you can see, various touchpoints have contributed to this sale. Using a last-click attribution model would give all the credit to the Google My Business profile, ignoring the earlier efforts that influenced the decision.
This example highlights why attribution modelling is vital to get the full picture.
By implementing attribution models, you can:
Optimise Channel Spend:
Allocate the budget to the most effective channels and touchpoints.
Understand Buyer Behaviour:
Gain insights into how prospects move through the sales funnel.
Improve Collaboration:
Help marketing and sales teams understand which efforts contribute most to conversions, fostering better alignment.
Multi-touch attribution is often the most suitable model for B2B because it reflects the complexity of the buyer journey and allows you to take a full view of campaign performance.
However, the best model for your business will depend on your goals, resources, and available data.
Analytics Tools
Analytics tools are essential for monitoring and optimising your B2B performance marketing campaigns.
Platforms like Google Analytics 4 (GA4) or CRMs such as HubSpot offer robust features that enable you to gather actionable insights and improve decision-making.
While there are a raft of other analytics tools available, the benefits of these tools are:
Google Analytics 4 (GA4)
GA4 represents a major evolution in analytics, offering advanced features tailored to modern marketing needs. Key benefits of GA4 include:
• Event-Based Tracking: Unlike its predecessor, GA4 focuses on tracking specific events, such as button clicks or form submissions, giving you a more detailed view of user interactions.
• Cross-Platform Insights: GA4 allows you to track user behaviour across websites, apps, and other digital touchpoints, providing a unified view of the customer journey.
• Predictive Metrics: With machine learning capabilities, GA4 can offer predictive insights, such as churn probability and revenue forecasts, helping you make data-driven decisions.
• Enhanced Privacy Compliance: GA4 is designed to align with privacy regulations, such as GDPR, offering tools to manage data retention and user consent effectively.
By leveraging GA4, you can monitor detailed metrics like user engagement, acquisition channels, and conversions, all while gaining a deeper understanding of how prospects move through your funnel.
HubSpot
HubSpot offers an integrated platform that combines CRM, marketing automation, and analytics, making it a powerful tool for B2B performance marketing.
Key features include:
• Lead Tracking and Scoring: HubSpot enables you to track leads throughout the sales cycle and assign scores based on engagement, ensuring sales teams focus on high-quality opportunities.
• Custom Dashboards: Create tailored dashboards to track specific metrics, such as MQL to SQL conversion rates or campaign ROI, helping teams stay aligned with business objectives.
• Attribution Reporting: HubSpot’s attribution tools help identify which channels and campaigns contribute most to conversions, supporting more informed budget allocations.
• Automation Insights: Analyse the performance of automated workflows, such as email nurture campaigns, to refine your strategy and maximise engagement.
Other popular platforms include Salesforce or PipeDrive. Smaller businesses CRMs like Monday or Zoho are also popular.
Which CRM works best for you will depend on your needs – but take a look at this article for some recommendations.
Why Advanced Analytics Matter
Using tools like GA4 and HubSpot allows you to:
• Track Real-Time Performance: Stay informed about campaign effectiveness and make adjustments on the fly.
• Identify High-Performing Channels: Focus resources on the platforms delivering the best results.
• Optimise the Buyer Journey: Gain insights into where prospects drop off and implement strategies to re-engage them.
By leveraging advanced analytics, you can take a data-driven approach to B2B performance marketing, ensuring every decision is informed by actionable insights.
AB Testing for Success
Performance marketing thrives on iteration and constant refinement. Regularly optimising your campaigns ensures they remain effective and aligned with your business objectives. To maximise the impact of your efforts, focus on continuous improvement through systematic testing, audience refinement, and dynamic budget allocation.
A/B testing is a critical method for optimisation. By testing different versions of your ads, landing pages, or email campaigns, you can identify which elements drive higher engagement or conversions.
For example, you can experiment with headlines or calls-to-action in ads, adjust landing page designs, or test variations in email content to refine your approach and achieve better results.
Refining targeting and audience segmentation is another key strategy. Regularly review demographic and behavioural data to ensure your audience profiles are accurate. Consider segmenting audiences based on their position in the buyer journey, which allows you to deliver tailored messaging.
Additionally, excluding low value audiences can help you focus resources on high-value accounts, reducing wasteful spending and increasing the likelihood of meaningful engagement.
Analysing performance by channel is essential to identify the platforms delivering the best ROI. Allocate more resources to high-performing channels, such as LinkedIn Ads for B2B audiences, while pausing or optimising campaigns on underperforming platforms.
Monitoring trends over time can help you adapt your strategy to align with evolving buyer behaviour.
Budget allocation should remain a dynamic process informed by performance insights. Increase spend on campaigns that exceed ROI benchmarks and reallocate the budget from underperforming campaigns to those with higher potential. Balancing investments across the sales funnel ensures adequate support for awareness, consideration, and decision-stage efforts.
Keeping an eye on competitor activity can also provide valuable insights. Analyse their messaging, offers, and strategies to identify gaps or opportunities for your own campaigns. Tools like SEMrush or social media monitoring platforms can help you gather actionable intelligence to stay competitive.
Establishing regular review cycles is vital for maintaining campaign effectiveness.
Conduct weekly reviews of performance metrics like click-through rates and conversion rates, evaluate broader trends on a monthly basis, and perform comprehensive analyses of ROI and attribution models quarterly.
These reviews enable you to adapt campaigns to changing market conditions and customer needs.
Align Performance Marketing B2B Metrics with Business Outcomes
While performance metrics like CPL and ROAS are essential, they’re only meaningful if they align with broader business goals. Collaborating with your sales and leadership teams is crucial to ensure marketing efforts directly support overarching organisational objectives.
Start by setting clear revenue targets tied to your marketing campaigns. For example, determine how much pipeline growth is required to achieve specific sales goals and assign marketing campaigns a tangible role in contributing to that growth.
Metrics such as cost per acquisition (CPA) and customer lifetime value (CLV) can help evaluate how efficiently your marketing spend is supporting these targets.
Ensure marketing activities align closely with sales efforts to create a seamless buyer journey. This can involve synchronising marketing and sales workflows, such as ensuring the sales team promptly follows up on MQLs.
Alignment between teams helps to maximise the conversion of leads into customers and builds a more cohesive strategy.
Retention and upselling should also be key considerations when aligning marketing metrics with business outcomes.
Marketing campaigns focused on customer success, such as personalised email campaigns or loyalty programmes, can strengthen existing customer relationships. Measuring metrics like repeat purchase rates or the percentage of upsell opportunities closed can provide valuable insights into how well marketing efforts contribute to long-term revenue growth.
Finally, insights from marketing metrics can be used to drive strategic decision-making at the executive level.
Demonstrate how specific campaigns or strategies impact not only short-term performance but also the company’s long-term growth trajectory. By aligning marketing metrics with business outcomes, you establish marketing as a critical driver of organisational success, ensuring continued investment and collaboration across teams.
By showing how marketing efforts drive tangible results, you can secure buy-in for future campaigns and budget increases.
Measuring success in B2B performance marketing requires a combination of clear objectives, relevant metrics, and continuous optimisation. By focusing on the right KPIs, tracking performance across the funnel, and aligning your efforts with business outcomes, you can demonstrate the value of your marketing campaigns and drive meaningful results for your organisation.
