B2B Metrics Aren't Measuring Up

A survey by marketing automation solution provider Pardot reveals that a significant number of business-to-business (B2B) marketers aren't actively or accurately tracking the revenue that their campaigns generate, a non-practice that can lead to missed opportunities in establishing B2B marketing's "essential role" in the growth of a business.

For the survey, Pardot talked with dozens of anonymous B2B marketers about their strategies and how they implement their programs, including what they choose to measure, how they do it and the standards they use for qualifying leads.

According to Pardot, as many as 37 percent of all marketers simply aren't tracking the revenue they generate. By not measuring the results of their lead management programs, many B2B marketers are not accurately reporting their value to their organizations.

Of those marketers who aren't tracking and reporting their results, approximately 40 percent said that it was because they lacked the time and/or resources necessary to create and analyze these sometimes complex reports.

The survey also found that 20 percent of marketers don't measure marketing-sourced leads at all, 30 percent don't track "advanced" metrics, like marketing-sourced opportunities, 35 percent don't use lead nurturing for less qualified leads and almost 30 percent lack the tools needed to track leads through the sales cycle.

These are pretty dire numbers for the B2B marketing industry, which does, at least, understand that it needs to adapt its analytics approach to a more data-driven model; as many as 80 percent of the survey's respondents said that they want to spend more time in the upcoming year focusing on marketing metrics, and 85 percent will be initiating plans that require leads to meet a given set of criteria before they're passed on to sales teams.

In addition, the survey found that one-third of respondents felt that marketing qualified leads (MQLs) are the most important metric for them to measure, while marketing-contributed opportunities came in second. Metrics that were less revenue-driven, like site traffic or page views, were considered the least important.