Outcomes Over Activity: Translating Marketing Metrics You Understand

Why “vanity metrics” cause a disconnect

Impressions, likes, and reach look good on a marketing dashboard, but they rarely mean anything to the person signing off next quarter’s budget. If the only story you can tell is “engagement went up,” it’s an easy line item to cut when budgets tighten — because nobody outside marketing understands how those metrics turned the dial. This isn’t a minority problem either: research cited by Uptempo found that 64% of CMOs admit they can’t prove marketing’s impact with quantitative metrics, and it’s a big part of why marketing budgets get frozen or cut first when things get tight.

The metrics that actually matter, mapped by objective

• If the goal is growth — track new customer acquisition cost and conversion rate, not just traffic

• If the goal is retention — track repeat purchase rate and churn, not just follower count

• If the goal is brand building — track share of voice and sentiment alongside reach, not reach alone — and there are ways to do this for “free.” Tools like Google Alerts or the free tiers of social listening platforms can get you a rough read on share of voice and sentiment without a full media monitoring subscription

The right metric depends entirely on what the business is actually trying to achieve — not which numbers are easiest to pull from a dashboard.

Translating marketing language into business language

Do you know what metrics you should be measuring, and how to explain them to someone outside marketing? This is often the missing link. A report full of CPMs, CTRs, and engagement rates means little to a finance director — but “every £1 spent here returned £4 in sales” gets understood, and defended in a board meeting. This gap shows up consistently in the data: Demandbase’s guide for CMOs points out that vanity and activity metrics actively hurt marketing’s credibility with the rest of the business, while metrics tied to pipeline and revenue build it. Part of what I do is exactly that translation: turning marketing performance into the language the rest of your business speaks.

Turning the read into a plan

Numbers on their own don’t fix anything — they need a clear next step attached. For every report, that means:

• What’s working, can it be optimised further, and should it get more budget

• What’s underperforming, and why — can it be fixed, or should we cut losses and pivot budget elsewhere

• A specific, rationale-backed, prioritised plan for what changes next — not a long list of options

This kind of discipline is exactly what boards are now demanding: the Spring 2025 CMO Survey found 63% of CMOs report increased pressure from their CFO to prove ROI, and 61% from their CEO — meaning a clear, prioritised plan isn’t a nice-to-have anymore, it’s the price of keeping your budget.