Blog / Essential Digital Marketing KPIs and Metrics for B2B Success

Decision Makers Don’t Need More Data. They Need Better Data.

Better digital marketing KPIs begin by changing the way agencies and marketers report on their daily activities.

For many board members and C-suite leaders, the marketing team’s effectiveness must be consistently demonstrated. In other words, they need to see that the investment in marketing is yielding results: that leads are being generated, prospects converted, and revenue goals are on track. 

Traditionally, this has led marketing teams to adopt a “bottom-up” approach to reporting on marketing KPIs. Each team within the marketing function—whether SEO, paid media, or content—reports on its specific metrics: the SEO team highlights increases in organic traffic and conversions, while the paid media team showcases impressions and the role of ads in bringing new users to the site. This detailed, channel-by-channel reporting does provide insight, but it often creates two significant issues: silos within marketing functions and reports that are overly tactical, making it difficult for executives to see the big picture. 

The Pitfalls of Bottom-Up Reporting on Marketing Metrics

Bottom-up reporting for marketing KPIs has its place. These granular insights are essential for tracking the day-to-day performance of campaigns, identifying issues, and making tactical adjustments. But this style of reporting can frequently result in fragmented, even contradictory, conclusions from one team to the next. 

Teams are siloed, focused on justifying their own performance rather than providing a cohesive picture of marketing’s contribution to overall business goals. For decision-makers, this means time-consuming reports that fail to communicate how digital marketing efforts impact the business’s growth and efficiency. 

A Top-Down Approach to Marketing Metrics: The Solution for C-Suite Clarity 

To provide C-suite executives with the clear, actionable data they need, marketers should consider a “top-down” approach to analytics and reporting. Unlike bottom-up reporting, top-down starts with the highest-impact business metrics and works down to lower levels. For example, instead of leading with clicks, impressions, or traffic spikes, top-down reports begin with metrics that have direct relevance to business goals, such as growth rate, net revenue retention (NRR), or sales productivity.

Top-down reporting aligns data with overall organisational objectives, providing a unified view of performance and making it easier for executives to gauge marketing’s value. This method also minimises the risk of conflicting data and ensures consistency across reporting channels. When departments are unified under standardised metrics, it becomes easier to pinpoint where a strategy might be underperforming, identify inefficiencies in the pipeline, and support more informed and aligned decision-making at the highest level of the business.

Bottom-Up and Top-Down: The Power of Using Both in Tandem

It’s not about choosing one over the other; combining top-down and bottom-up reporting allows companies to gain a complete view of marketing performance. While top-down reporting gives a high-level, unified perspective that drives strategic decision-making, bottom-up reporting allows individual teams to remain agile and responsive to specific campaign needs. When used together, the result is a powerful analytics foundation that can show executives what is working while also highlighting areas that need attention or adjustment—at both macro and micro levels.

Adopting a top-down analytics philosophy empowers decision-makers to focus on the metrics that matter most and enables marketing teams to move beyond proving performance to actively shaping it.