Sports fans love to argue about statistics, but most will agree that you can’t define a player’s value with one metric. The most valuable player isn’t necessarily the one who hit the most home runs, or scored the most points, or had the highest completion percentage.

Likewise, you also can’t gauge the success of a B2B marketing campaign with a single measurement. Yet many advertising platforms offer automated recommendations to ‘optimize’ campaigns by focusing on a single statistic.

One KPI is never enough. Digital marketing success requires not just a combination of different metrics, but strategic alignment of those metrics within the complete context of your campaigns.

Beware of platforms promoting single metrics.

Not all digital marketing advice is neutral. Service providers, social media platforms, and ad networks may draw your focus to individual metrics that suggest your campaigns are performing well. They’ll recommend you increase your budget or expand audience targeting to boost that metric even more.

While these suggestions might seem helpful, they’re often based on metrics that favor the platform’s bottom line — not yours.

Meanwhile, doubling down on awareness or engagement indicators such as impressions or clickthrough rate (CTR) might lead you to downplay deeper metrics such as conversion rate, cost per acquisition (CPA), or return on ad spend (ROAS). Even if your performance in that single metric skyrockets, it won’t necessarily help you boost the one statistic that really matters — sales.

The pitfalls of isolated metrics.

For example, if a platform highlights that your impressions are killing it, it implies that your ads are reaching a large audience — but it says nothing about whether those impressions are leading to meaningful engagement or sales.

So, you might focus on increasing impressions by expanding your audience to include broader demographics, but if these new impressions aren’t converting or driving quality engagement, you’re wasting your budget.

Most marketing metrics are useful, but not all by themselves.

• Impressions are crucial for understanding campaign visibility, but they don’t reveal if your ad is compelling enough to drive engagement or if it’s leading to any tangible outcomes.
• Click-through rate (CTR) shows engagement, but it doesn’t indicate whether those clicks are converting into valuable actions.
• Conversion rate, on its own, doesn’t tell you how broad your audience reach is or if your ad is even visible to the right people.

Each of these metrics is important, but without context they give you an incomplete or even skewed view of performance. Making B2B campaign decisions based on a single metric is like drafting baseball players purely on the basis of their home run-hitting ability. Your team will hit a lot of home runs, but it might not win very many games.

Combining metrics for a more complete picture.

Impressions, CTR, and conversion rate all represent different stages in the B2B marketing funnel. To make informed decisions about a campaign, it’s critical to monitor these metrics together.

For example, if you’re generating a high volume of impressions but seeing a low CTR, you might need to adjust your creative, messaging, or audience targeting. On the other hand, a strong CTR with low conversion rates suggests a disconnect between the promise made in your ads and the experience delivered on your landing page.

Make sure the metrics capture the full financial impact of your campaign.

• Cost per acquisition (CPA) shows how efficiently you’re converting clicks or leads into customers.
• Return on ad spend (ROAS) tells you how much revenue you’re generating for every dollar spent.
• Customer lifetime value (CLV) reveals the long-term value of the customers you’re acquiring.

By combining these deeper business metrics with your digital marketing data, you gain a more complete understanding of how well your campaign is working at its main purpose — driving profitability.