What I'd Do Differently: How I Used to Think About Metrics

This post originally appeared in my Substack newsletter, The Work Behind the Work. Subscribe here.

Early in my career, the report I was proudest of was a monthly marketing review. It looked impressive, packed with charts, and it tracked absolutely everything – the number of new social media followers, the posts we published, the emails we sent, website visitors, event attendees, and mentions in the press. Every figure was going up. I walked into the meeting completely sure of myself.

The executives glanced through the report, gave a polite nod, and then asked, “Okay, so what does all of this mean for the business?”

I didn’t have a very good answer. The report was built to prove that the marketing department was busy, not to show that it was having an impact. It showed we were occupied; it didn’t show we were making a difference.

That moment didn’t immediately change my thinking, but it planted a seed that took years to grow. Looking back, the shift in how I think about marketing metrics has been one of the most important changes in my career.

Photo by Deng Xiang on Unsplash

Stage one: measuring what gets done

At first, I judged success by how much we produced. How many pieces of content went out? How many social posts went live? How many emails were sent? How many events did we support?

At the time, this felt right because I could control output. I couldn’t control whether a potential customer became a real one, but I could control whether the content calendar was full and the social accounts were active. Measuring output gave me a sense of progress and a simple story to tell in meetings.

The problem with output metrics is that they reward activity, regardless of the outcome. You can post 50 times on social in a month and feel productive. But if those posts aren’t reaching the right people, making the right point, or prompting anyone to do something that matters, that work is just noise – expensive, time-wasting noise.

I stayed in the output stage for too long. Many companies unintentionally encourage it. When leaders ask, “What has marketing been doing?” the easiest reply is a list of things you’ve produced. It takes more confidence – and more organisational maturity – to answer with what you’ve achieved.

Stage two: measuring how well things worked

The next stage was an improvement, but still incomplete. I started tracking performance metrics – engagement rates, click-through rates, open rates, traffic growth, and follower growth. These felt more sophisticated than output metrics because they measured how the audience responded, not just what the team produced.

And to be clear, performance metrics are useful. They help you improve campaigns in real time. They show you what’s working and what isn’t. They give you the data to make better decisions about what to create and which channels to use.

But performance metrics have a seductive quality: they can look great while meaning very little to the business. A social post with a 6% engagement rate feels like a win – until you ask whether any of that engagement turned into real opportunities, awareness among the right people, or support for sales. Sometimes it did. Sometimes it didn’t. And the performance metrics alone couldn’t tell me which.

There’s another issue with performance metrics: we often compare them without context. Your email open rate is 28% – is that good? Compared to what? Industry benchmarks? Last quarter? A competitor you barely understand? Performance metrics are relative. Without a clear link to business results, they become a game of beating your own past numbers for no real reason.

Stage three: measuring the effect

The shift to impact-based thinking didn’t happen overnight. It came slowly, through repeated moments when I realised the metrics I was reporting weren’t answering the questions leaders actually cared about. Impact metrics are different because they start with the company, not with marketing. Instead of asking, “How well did the campaign perform?” the question becomes, “What changed for the business because of what marketing did?”

Here’s what that looks like in practice:

Pipeline influence. Instead of “How many leads did marketing generate?” ask, “How much of the current pipeline has had meaningful marketing touchpoints?” This reframes marketing’s role – from just generating leads to supporting the pipeline continuously. It’s also closer to reality: marketing rarely creates a deal from nothing, but it often warms people up, educates them, and moves them forward in the buying process.

Sales cycle speed. Are deals that experienced marketing touchpoints – people consuming content, attending events, responding to nurture sequences – closing faster than deals that didn’t? It’s difficult to measure perfectly, but even directional data helps. If marketing-touched deals consistently close sooner, that’s strong evidence marketing is making the sales process easier.

Inbound demand. Put individual campaign performance aside for a moment and look at the bigger picture. Is inbound demand – demo requests, form submissions, people finding high-intent pages through search – increasing quarter over quarter? This is one of the clearest signs that the whole of marketing’s work is building awareness and trust, even if no single campaign gets the credit.

Content usage. Are the assets marketing creates actually being used? This matters especially for sales enablement. If marketing produces a competitor comparison and the sales team uses it in 40% of deals, that’s real impact. If it sits untouched in a shared drive, the effort was wasted, no matter how good the content looked.

What I’d tell my earlier self

If I could go back and talk to the version of me who created that polished but pointless monthly report, here’s what I’d say:

Start with the company’s questions, not the marketing data. Before you build a report, ask, “What does leadership need to know?” and “What decisions will this data inform?” If a report doesn’t change a decision, it’s just documentation.

Measure fewer things, but do it better. A dashboard with thirty numbers is a dashboard with no focus. Choose three to five metrics that clearly connect marketing activity to business outcomes, and track those well. Everything else is either noise or working data for the team – useful internally, but not for leadership.

Separate reporting from learning. The leadership report should be short and focused on outcomes. The internal view for the team can be more detailed and exploratory. Trying to make one document serve both purposes usually means it serves neither well.

Accept that you’ll never perfectly attribute credit. You will never be able to prove the exact amount of revenue marketing created. Stop chasing that illusion. Instead, build a body of evidence – directional data, feedback from sales, and trend shifts – that together tell a clear story about marketing’s impact. An honest story supported by multiple signals is more credible than a single “perfect” number you can’t defend.

Make measurement part of the work, not an afterthought. If you’re scrambling to prove impact once a campaign ends, you’re already too late. Define success before the work begins. Bake tracking into the campaign plan. When measurement is built in from the start, the results will be there when you need them.

I spent years creating reports that proved marketing was busy. It took longer than I’d like to start producing reports that proved marketing was working. The difference wasn’t tools or data – it was learning to ask a better question.