B2B Marketing Analytics
Six factors for B2B marketers to consider when developing analytics and reporting strategies.
NEED TO KNOW
- Organize consensus around 2-3 KPIs
- Invest aggressively in dashboards
- Deliver templated monthly and quarterly reports
- Lean into AI
- Tread carefully around attribution
The digital marketing sector is undergoing a meaningful, if not tectonic, shift in 2025. The combination of a soft economy, new technology introduction (AI), and shifting CxO expectations has initiated a sort of correction and it feels like the category is shrinking. Even though marketing spending overall is either flat or up — especially among B2B companies — big ad agencies are contracting, the job market is tepid, and there’s a general sense of uncertainty in the air. In this environment, B2B marketing analytics is getting more attention. Here are six factors for B2B marketers to consider when assessing their strategies.
1. Organize Consensus Around 2-3 KPIs
There’s too much data in digital marketing. Many of the core systems driving the industry were built by engineers who had a real appreciation for data and the ready availability of this information has served as the foundation of the marketing industry’s revival over the past decade.
But it’s also created alot of confusion and an over-correction to the old maxim, “I know half of my advertising dollars are well-spent, I just don’t know which half”. Today, this ratio is more like 75%/25% — we still don’t have a great handle on that stray 25% — and part of the reason is due to the glut of data available. Too many options can create as much angst as too few.
Every organization has unique requirements, but these three KPIs are priority metrics for most B2B organizations.
1. Lead Volume. Fill the funnel. Be in front of prospects before they realize they have a need for whatever it is that you sell. B2B marketing is nothing if not about sheer volume. Qualify the inbounds using whatever method works — scoring, company size, job title — but keep growing the list.
2. Lead Unit Cost. This is our efficiency metric, our miles-per-gallon (or MPGe). Low-funnel leads can cost 100X more than top-of-funnel so not all are created equal and this needs to be factored into tracking and reporting, as does competitor behavior, which can wreak havoc on historical benchmarks.
3. Website Traffic. No one is suggesting a return to relying on clicks or gaudy vanity metrics to monitor performance. But websites are critical to the B2B customer journey and the relationship between engaged visitor volume and net new lead volume is undeniable.
Pro Tip: Vet your priority metrics with CxO stakeholders in 1:1 meetings before distributing widely across the organization.
2. Deliver Sizzling Dashboards
Data visualization tools like Tableau, Qlik and Looker Studio have helped to accelerate this most recent version of marketing evolution in part because it makes the function participatory. Making performance reporting dashboards available to executives and non-executives alike 24/7/365 is no longer optional at many organizations and it’s understandable: digital-first B2B companies allocate millions of dollars annually to marketing tactics and they want to understand how their investments are performing – in near real-time. Just like they are able to monitor their investment portfolios and childrens’ Little League games through a snazzy dashboard interface, they want the same at work.
Pro Tip: Don’t wait to be asked to deliver a performance dashboard — get out ahead of the request and set the context and dictate the narrative.
3. Foster & Celebrate Executive Buy-In
Unless you work at a place like Coca-Cola, Nike or Apple, marketing is probably not a driving force at the company — even though marketing and sales expenditures can be as much as 50% of annual revenues at B2B SaaS companies, with even $1B+ companies in the category allocating more than 40% of revenues to promotion and new business acquisition. Business categories with insanely high gross profit margins attract competitors quickly and this means competition for new business — both net new and renewals — is fierce. Robust marketing and sales operations help companies differentiate and be successful.
So even if marketing is relegated to a complementary role to domain expertise or sales in a B2B corporate environment, more dollars are being invested in the function and so it’s getting more attention. And this means B2B marketers need to allocate a good deal of time, resources and relationship capital to helping CxOs understand how modern marketing operations work, what kind of outcomes are realistic, and competitive benchmarks. It’s not unusual for the direct marketing cost of a new B2B customer to be $25,000 or more, and that’s ok if the lifetime value of an average new client is hundreds of thousands of dollars, but sticker shock is a persistent and understandable reaction. These concerns need to be addressed head-on.
Takeaways: Most executive teams have at least one member with experience in assessing lifetime customer value and working it into reporting, ROI modeling, and budget planning exercises.
4. Acknowledge Blind Spots
As much as half of all internet traffic is bots and as many as 3-in-4 of some demographic groups turn off cookies or website tracking to protect their privacy. There’s a whole lot of noise to cut through to get reliable data to analyze.
But it’s still a marked improvement over what marketers had to deal with a couple of decades ago. We do have reams of data readily available to us, and much of it is useful. But it’s not comprehensive and it isn’t bulletproof. That’s too much to ask in an environment where 50% of the traffic is machine-generated and more than half of the remaining human traffic is muddied by privacy settings.
Takeaways: Whenever possible, work backwards from customer acquisition costs and lifetime customer value and build out reporting with reliable, tangible actions like form completions at the core.
5. Address Attribution
Marketing attribution — the process of identifying which touchpoints contributed to a customer’s conversion or action, like a sale — is a huge challenge for B2B marketers and also critical. Many CMOs now have a legitimate seat at the CxO table and with that inclusion comes new reporting and tracking responsibilities.
Attribution is a greater challenge for B2B marketers than B2C brethren because the customer journey is long, non-linear, and involves at least a handful of people. Mimi Turner of the LinkedIn Marketing Solutions team describes it more elegantly in a recent Marketing Week article:
“In the standard B2B marketing model, brand investment is expected to drive awareness and emotional engagement. Once engagement signals are captured, they are handed to performance marketing and sales teams who often get revenue attribution for closing the deal. The flaw is that this linear, simplistic model of attribution conflates activity and influence.”
Takeaways: Big companies and best practice B2B concerns are investing aggressively in analytics and attribution capabilities, but no matter how savvy the technology, accurate reporting requires offline alignment between marketing, sales and customer success groups.
6. Embrace AI
The AI train has left the station and it’s time to grab a seat if you aren’t already on board. CxOs expect their managers to be testing and deploying AI tools across the enterprise and no function is feeling this pressure more acutely than marketing, even at B2B companies, which typically lag adoption of new technologies, but not so with AI.
Fortunately, AI isn’t an all-or-nothing endeavor. Sure, some marketing operations and agencies are touting “AI-only” approaches, but those are edge cases. The vast majority of B2B marketing teams are testing tactics in their daily workstreams — crafting blog posts, creating ad copy, modifying creative — and doubling down on what works and tossing out what doesn’t. In this respect, we’re using the same test>launch>measure>rinse>repeat method that digital marketers have deployed from the get-go.
Takeaways: AI and B2B marketing interface in two primary ways: the tools used to deliver marketing solutions, and the ways in which prospects engage with us. These are two unique challenges that B2B managers need to address head-on.
RESOURCES & FURTHER READING
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Tim Bourgeois is a freelance PPC consultant at East Coast Catalyst and manages the B2B PPC management practice. Contact him at tbourgeois(a)eastcoastcatalyst.com to discuss how his team can help with B2B digital marketing strategy and lead generation initiatives.