How to measure marketing results: KPIs that matter

You measure marketing results with five numbers: how many enquiries came in, what one enquiry cost, how many became clients, what one client cost and what that client is worth over time.

Likes, reach and followers are not on this list. If a marketing report can’t answer “how much did we spend and how much came back”, it is decoration.

The problem: we measure what’s easy to measure

59 percent of marketers name website traffic as their primary KPI, according to a HubSpot survey cited by SparkToro. Traffic goes up, the phone stays silent, the slide looks great.

Marketing leaders know it’s not enough. In the 2026 CMO Survey, 78.2 percent of them name higher return on every marketing dollar as a priority, and 86.3 percent focus on stronger tracking of marketing performance. Companies usually have the data. What’s missing is a decision about which numbers to look at.

Five KPIs that make sense in B2B

• Enquiries per month. People who wrote or called. A concrete number.
• Cost per lead (CPL). Budget divided by the number of enquiries.
• Lead-to-client conversion. Shows where the problem is. Few enquiries is a marketing problem. Many enquiries and few contracts is a sales or lead quality problem.
• Customer acquisition cost (CAC). Budget divided by the number of new clients. Without it you don’t know whether a campaign pays off.
• Customer lifetime value (LTV). One multi-year contract can be worth more than ten small ones, even if it cost more to win.

With long sales cycles there is a sixth number: time from first contact to signature. More on that in the piece on long B2B sales cycles.

What it looks like with real numbers

The campaign for Aperto, an accounting firm: 106 contacts on a budget of 1,891.63 zł. About 18 zł per contact. The reach of 33,591 people and 65,000 video views are in the report too, on page two. Page one says 18 zł.

The opposite example: Keyspace. Six polished, good-looking films, no sales from ads. Had I looked at reach, I would have called it a success. I looked at sales, so instead of pouring more budget into the same thing we drew conclusions.

At dabrowskimedia every month of work ends with a report that has three numbers at the top: what an enquiry cost, how many enquiries became clients and what that brought the company. Those three numbers decide whether the budget keeps going this way or we change course.

Where to start if you measure nothing today

1. Count enquiries from the last three months and note where they came from (website, referral, LinkedIn, trade fairs).
2. Ask sales how many became clients.
3. Divide marketing spend by the number of enquiries and by the number of clients. That’s your CPL and CAC.
4. Set one target number for next quarter. One, not ten.

If you’d rather have someone set this up and watch it every month, it’s part of my work as a fractional CMO.

Which KPIs matter most in B2B marketing?

Enquiries, cost per lead (CPL), lead-to-client conversion, customer acquisition cost (CAC) and customer lifetime value (LTV). These connect marketing to sales.

Is follower count a good metric?

Not as a primary KPI. Followers don’t tell you how many of them buy. They can help assess one campaign, but a board report starts with the cost of acquiring a client.

How do you measure marketing with a long sales cycle?

Split leads into stages and track the time from first contact to signature. A campaign from six months ago may only now be closing deals, so judge it over a longer window.

Want to sort out reporting in your company? Book a free online presence audit.