How B2B Brands Waste Budget on Vanity Metrics

Lucas: Luna, I was looking at the latest Gartner CMO survey from a few weeks ago, and one number jumped out: sixty-eight percent of B2B marketers still report impressions, clicks, and cost per click as their primary success metrics. Luna: That is wild. Those are essentially broadcast metrics — they tell you almost nothing about whether a deal is moving. Lucas: Right. And the survey also found that only twenty-two percent of those same teams say they can tie marketing activity directly to closed revenue. So there's this massive disconnect between what gets reported up to the C-suite and what actually drives business. Luna: So why do these vanity metrics persist? I mean, we've been talking about moving to pipeline and revenue attribution for years now. Lucas: I think there are three reasons. First, executive comfort — CEOs and boards are used to seeing reach numbers. An impression count is easy to digest, even if it's meaningless. Second, tool defaults — most marketing automation platforms still surface click-through rate and cost per click right on the dashboard. You have to actively customise to show weighted pipeline or meeting-attendance rate. And third, agency incentives — if you're paying an agency per click or per thousand impressions, they are not going to volunteer to switch to a revenue-based metric. Luna: Okay, so let's get concrete. Can you give me an example of a team that actually made the switch and saw results? Lucas: Yeah, I talked to the VP of Demand Gen at a mid-market SaaS company — about seventy million in ARR, selling to HR teams. They had been running a classic top of funnel playbook: lots of display, lots of LinkedIn sponsored content, lots of gated ebooks. Their reported cost per lead was around forty-two dollars, which their CEO loved. Luna: But those leads weren't converting. Lucas: Exactly. They were generating about eight hundred MQLs a month, but only three percent of those ever booked a meeting. So the VP said, let's stop reporting on MQL count entirely. Instead, we'll report on two things: number of meetings attended by a qualified buyer, and pipeline created from those meetings. Luna: That's a scary move for a marketing team. If you take away the MQL number, your CEO might think you're doing nothing. Lucas: It is scary, and she told me the first month was brutal — the number of meetings looked tiny compared to what the MQL dashboard used to show. But she had prepped the CEO, explained the logic, and got a three-month trial. By the end of the second quarter, the number of qualified meetings had doubled, and pipeline from marketing-sourced opportunities was up twenty-two percent compared to the prior period. Luna: So the key was changing what the CEO looked at every week. Lucas: Exactly. The CEO stopped asking 'how many leads did we get?' and started asking 'how many real conversations did we have with buyers who have budget and authority?' That question changes everything about campaign design. Luna: What about the agency side? If an agency is paid on impressions, they'll fight a switch to revenue metrics. Lucas: That's a real tension. I've seen companies solve it by shifting to a blended compensation model — a base fee plus a bonus tied to meetings booked or pipeline value, not clicks. One company I know moved their programmatic spend entirely in-house because no agency would agree to the change. They ended up reducing ad spend by about thirty percent and still growing pipeline, because the in-house team was focused on targeting signals, not volume. Luna: So what are the three concrete swaps you mentioned? Lucas: First, swap MQL count for 'meetings with target accounts.' Second, swap click-through rate for 'content engagement score' — which is time on page, scroll depth, return visits. And third, swap cost per lead for 'cost per qualified meeting.' All three of these force the team to optimise for buyer behaviour, not broadcast volume. Luna: I like that last one especially. Cost per meeting really captures whether your targeting is working. Lucas: And it's easy to calculate. Total campaign spend divided by number of meetings attended by a buyer from a named account. If that number is going down quarter over quarter, your marketing is genuinely more efficient. Luna: One concern I hear from ops teams is data quality — they say 'we'd love to report on meetings, but our CRM doesn't reliably track whether a meeting was attended.' Lucas: That's a fair point. And the fix is surprisingly simple: add a single custom field on the meeting object — 'meeting status' with values 'scheduled, attended, no-show, cancelled.' Then enforce that your sales team updates it within twenty-four hours. It's not perfect, but it's better than guessing based on email replies. Luna: Or worse, using impressions as a proxy for interest. Lucas: Right. And here's the thing — if you can't get your sales team to update a single dropdown after a meeting, you have a bigger problem than metric selection. You need to fix the handoff process first. Luna: I want to go back to the Gartner survey for a second. It said sixty-eight percent still use top of funnel metrics. Who are the thirty-two percent that have moved on? Lucas: I think those are the teams that report directly to a revenue officer — a CRO or a VP of Revenue — not a CMO. When you sit under revenue, you're forced to talk pipeline and closed-won. The CMO orgs that are still siloed from sales can keep reporting impressions because nobody is holding them accountable for revenue. Luna: So the organisational structure itself perpetuates vanity metrics. Lucas: It does. I've seen companies that moved marketing ops under the CRO and within two quarters the entire reporting stack changed. Suddenly you see things like 'marketing sourced pipeline as a percentage of total pipeline' and 'influenced revenue.' Luna: That's a structural fix. But for teams that aren't reorganising anytime soon, what's the one quick win? Lucas: Pick one high-intent campaign — say, a webinar series or an executive dinner — and report on it using only down-funnel metrics for ninety days. Show the CEO the difference between the old dashboard and the new one side by side. Once they see that fifty impressions don't equal one meeting, you have permission to change everything else. Luna: That's smart. Prove it on a small scale first. Lucas: Exactly. And if these kinds of conversations about marketing operations are useful to you, I'll mention something quick — a handful of listeners support this show through buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo, and that's what keeps us ad-free and focused on practical details like this. So if you've gotten something out of this episode, that's a simple way to keep it going. Luna: Yeah, it really does help. And it lets us keep digging into the specifics that get cut from shorter formats. Lucas: So back to that pilot campaign — the VP I mentioned ran her test on a three-part webinar series targeting HR directors at companies with over five hundred employees. Her old dashboard would have shown impressions and registrations. Her new dashboard showed meetings booked and pipeline created. By the end of the series, she had fifteen meetings from named accounts and four opportunities totaling about one point two million in pipeline. Luna: That's a much stronger story for the board than 'we got twenty thousand views.' Lucas: Absolutely. And that's the ultimate argument — vanity metrics make you look busy. Revenue metrics make you look valuable. Luna: So as we head into Q3, if you're a marketing ops person listening, what do you want them to do on Monday morning? Lucas: Open your marketing automation platform, find your most expensive campaign by spend, and write down the three metrics that appear on the default dashboard. If any of them is impressions, clicks, or cost per click, have a conversation with your CMO about changing the default view. That's where it starts.