What are some KPIs that you find over-hyped and/or unimportant?

• Not necessarily over-hyped, but I think it is important to find the balance between being too focused on top-of-funnel (Traffic, leads, MQLs) and having targets that are out of your control to drive (closed / won, revenue). If your marketing team is ONLY KPI'ed on MQLs and nothing else, you may be incentivized to drive a ton of volume at the detriment to quality. Then your sales team might come back and say that the 'leads' you are sending aren't good quality. If you don't have other metrics further down funnel (I recommend tracking SALs - sales accepted leads, and SQLs - meetings booked or opportunities created), then it becomes hard to identify where you need to optimize and lean in.
• I also see a lot of fuzziness around the word 'leads'. In my world today, lead means a net new name to the database. But, I will often hear BDRs talk about leads in terms of the people they are working (so an MQL or SQL), and AEs might talk about leads in terms of the deals they are working (an SQL or SQO). It's really important to make sure you have clear definitions for the KPIs that you are driving and that you are working over time to build a shared language in your organization. 

A lot of the digital, social metrics tend to be overhyped, especially impressions, page views, followers, etc.

What helps to sift through these is do a deeper analyses of these, e.g. who are the followers? Are they prospects/customers or mostly job seekers?

What is driving the page views? Source of the inbound traffic? Profile of visitors?

If you have to track the above metrics, it helps to double click and get a reality check to understand how much of it is relevant to your business. Otherwise, these can be just vanity metrics.

Similar to the question about worst KPIs, I believe vanity metrics and volume KPIs are often too easy to manipulate and can be used to tell a misleading story.

Metrics like email open rates and click-through rates can be artificially inflated by bots. Lead counts and sign-ups can also be influenced by acquisition campaigns that don’t necessarily bring in high-quality prospects. Likewise, a low cost-per-lead (CPL) is often over-hyped; in the end, what matters is quality, bottom-of-funnel conversion. Constantly feeding the top of the funnel with low-quality leads won’t actually move the needle.

I don't necessary think there are any KPIs that are "unimportant" as everything can be measured and provide value and insights to the business. However, there is a difference between marketing "inputs" and "outcomes." And "outcomes" should ultimately be those KPIs that truly impact that business (e.g. MQLs, SQLs, marketing generated pipeline, product demos or trials downloaded/viewed, etc.). While "inputs" are still important, they are those KPIs that help lead to or drive the business outcomes (e.g. web visits, cold leads, event attendees, etc.). I think marketers fall into the trap of putting too much of an emphasis on the inputs, instead of using them as a directional data point to better understand how you can impact the business outcomes. For instance, I've seen marketers care too much about measuring "leads" generated and spending too much time justifying why they're important, when they should be spending time on understand how MQLs and SQLs are driving results for the business.

I appreciate this question a lot, and it made me laugh. I'll take the "over-hyped" side of the question. It can come from any raw production KPI - leads, demos, event registrants etc. An element of quality needs to exist in most cases for those to hold value. The easy example is 100 demos and 90 are spam. The more difficult ones come from things like events where you want to fill the room, but is it filled with the right types of companies and right types of roles from those companies. We're currently working on getting ideas like 'quality leads' introduced to represents lead from accounts in our TAM.

One of the metrics I find overhyped is ROI by channel because it's a self fulfilling prophecy. If marketing is doing its job right, then all the channels are firing on all cylinders, creating the optimal outcome. ROI by channel is like asking which ingredient in the minestrone soup made it a success - broth, tomatoes, onion, salt - obviously the answer is the combination of ingredients and execution in cooking made It a success.

Same, in marketing, it’s the combination and interaction of all the marketing touchpoints—ads, events, content, website, podcasts—that create that perfect result. Focusing too much on individual channel ROI creates siloed strategies and underestimates the impact of the collective effort.

I answered this more comprehensively in another question, but to summarize:

1. Vanity Metrics: Anything that can be gamed or doesn't directly reflect impact with your target audience (e.g., raw traffic, followers, engagement metrics, etc.)

2. "Leads" Without Context: There are lots of low-value, scam-y ways you can incentivize someone to fill out a form on the internet. For that reason, "lead" volumes without context (qualification criteria) tell you very little about whether demand gen efforts are working.

The KPI that I believe is important but not solely by itself is `lead counts` (e.g., sign-ups or MQLs). I’ve seen over and over again how focusing only on counts without understanding quality just backfires. While this KPI can show significant improvements, the question to ask is, what is the downstream impact?

This may be an unpopular opinion, but looking at this KPI without additional quality metrics is marketing of the past. I recommend stitching together the full customer journey to understand the impact. For example, if a user signs up but never uses your product, is this a meaningful result?