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

A few KPIs are often over-hyped in demand gen: MQL volume—easy to inflate if you know what levers to pull, but doesn’t guarantee pipeline or revenue. Cost per lead (CPL)—can reward cheap, low-quality leads. Email open rates—increasingly unreliable due to tracking limits. Website traffic—good for awareness, but not a strong success signal on its own. Overall, these are activity or proxy metrics. They’re useful for context, but not great measures of true performance. Stronger KPIs focus on pipelin ...Read More

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 fur ...Read More

I answered this more comprehensively in another question, but to summarize: 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.) "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 wo ...Read More

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 cur ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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 conversi ...Read More

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. Othe ...Read More

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 understa ...Read More