Beyond Vanity: Why Measurement Is the Critical Lever in B2B Marketing

In the last decade, B2B marketing has undergone a seismic transformation. Targeting has shifted from broad industry proxies to hyper-precise account lists. Execution has matured from single-channel campaigns to orchestrated, omnichannel account experiences. But in all of this evolution, measurement remains the least mature, and yet the most decisive, element.

At FunnelFuel, we actually started with measurement. The inadequacies of existing analytics platforms for B2B were very evident, very early. In the few years that we have been going, this pain points is in greater evidence today then it was a few years ago - with privacy laws and signal loss leading to a more obscure measurement layer then we faced even 3 years ago.

The uncomfortable truth: most organisations are still making multimillion-pound investment decisions using analytics frameworks designed for FMCG e-commerce and the wider ‘consumer internet’ which is predicated on prodigious scale over precision.

Google Analytics 4 and Adobe Analytics can capture clicks, traffic, and conversions - but they were never architected to reflect the reality of long, multi-stakeholder B2B buying journeys. That gap is where performance is won or lost.

Why Measurement Is the Crucial Third Piece

If targeting is the “who” and execution is the “how,” measurement is the “so what.”

Without measurement, targeting and execution are operating in the dark.

I have spoken on previous webinars and written extensively here and in other publications about my personal opinion around this - which boils down to ‘begin with measurement’. It’s often taken as a peculiar opinion or at the very least raises eyebrows. I still find it staggering that elite vendors are investing double digit millions without world class measurement layers deployed first.

Today’s landscape makes this even more urgent: the cookie is disappearing, third-party data pipelines are drying up, and regulators are tightening the screws. CMOs cannot afford to rely on CTRs and MQL counts as a proxy for success. Those metrics don’t map to pipeline, they don’t capture the nuance of buying committee behavior, and they don’t predict future outcomes.

The organisations that will win are those that rebuild measurement from the ground up, anchoring it in first-party data, account-level behavior, and real business outcomes.

I still see a bunch of measurement mistakes in B2B - the below graphic aims to capture the 6 biggest from my POV;

Defining Success Beyond Vanity Metrics

The easiest trap in B2B marketing is mistaking activity for impact.

Impressions, clicks, and even form fills can look encouraging on a dashboard, but they rarely correlate with revenue.

Instead, organisations should orient around capturing High Value Actions (HVAs) — the behaviours that indicate meaningful progression in the buying journey. These actions in concert meaning they play together. Individually they are weak, in concert they are powerful and help uncover the micro-currents behind the bigger waves of procurement. These might include:

• A second or third visit from a company within the ICP.

• Time spent on implementation guides, pricing pages, or API documentation.

• Engagement from new members of a buying committee (e.g. security, finance, IT).

• Repeat form interactions or deep funnel page engagement.

Platforms like FunnelFuel map these HVAs directly to account records, score them against historical conversion patterns, and feed them back into demand platforms to optimise media in-flight. This closes the loop between measurement and activation — something GA4 or Adobe cannot do natively.

In my opinion, the objective should be to map account based behaviour to HVA’s, and to treat these as scored/weighted micro-conversions. As these micro-conversions start adding up, progressing, surging and generally accelerating, we should be scoring the accounts accordingly - which should pipeline back to media activation.

The objective is to migrate from a single ‘large TAL’ to an intelligent scored account list based on qualifying behaviour, intent and fit. Click the image below to read my detailed views on this topic

Building Measurement in From the Start

One of the most damaging habits in B2B marketing is treating measurement as a post-mortem. Teams design campaigns, execute, and only then decide which numbers to pull.

Below, we dive into;

• How to identify outcome metrics before the first impression fires - and set up to win

• Enterprise analytics solutions compared

• A B2B marketers guides to CDPs and where they have gaps

• Predictive analytics for B2B marketing

• Quantitative versus Qualitative analytics and B2B - how to build a foundation with one and still layer softer metrics in to the system and automate it

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