When you’re determining the key performance indicators (KPIs) for a B2B marketing campaign, it’s important to know what to measure, and when. It’s also important to know when to stop.

You’re probably familiar with the concept of the marketing funnel. We see the B2B buyer journey differently. It may start out as funnel-shaped, but at a certain point — when conventional awareness and engagement KPIs are no longer useful — it turns into something more like an hourglass.

An hourglass? Yes. Read on.

Awareness and engagement are at the top of the hourglass.

B2B buyer journeys are rarely linear, but the old “funnel” model still holds true in one respect: You have to make many potential customers aware of your offering — and engage quite a few of them — to identify the handful who may actually become customers.

Awareness and engagement are the two areas where it makes sense to use all the familiar KPIs. But you should never decide on the KPIs for a B2B campaign without answering some basic questions:

• What is the campaign’s goal? Note the singular. Sure, a campaign can have multiple goals, but there needs to be an ultimate destination for your potential buyers.
• What are the tools you’ll need to measure that goal? Failing to have these tools at your disposal from day one is like driving 200 miles before you realize you forgot your phone.
• Can what you are measuring help adjust your campaign? If not, they’re not KPIs, because they aren’t “key” and they don’t “indicate” anything useful.

Choose KPIs that will help you make critical changes if needed during the campaign (or reassure you that those changes aren’t needed). Can you divert spend to where it’s most effective? Can you introduce new creative to double down on what’s generating the best KPIs? Measurement without any possible resulting action is just trivia.

And don’t forget it can take weeks or even months for your awareness and engagement efforts to give you actionable results. Checking metrics after four days without a significant sample just leads to more noise and less accurate decision-making.

What happens at the middle of the hourglass?

B2B awareness and engagement campaigns are usually all about identifying people and organizations who are strong candidates to become customers. For simplicity’s sake — whether you prefer MQLs, SQLS, OQLs, or just any old QL — let’s just call them leads.

Once you have leads it’s time to stop measuring conventional marketing KPIs.

That’s because this is the point where the funnel becomes an hourglass. Instead of measuring how many people are aware of (or engaged with) your marketing content, you should now be focused on how deeply each lead is engaged with your organization.

The bottom of the hourglass is a completely different world than the top part. Your KPIs should be completely different, too.

KPIs at the bottom of the hourglass.

Your goals at bottom of the hourglass are almost 180 degrees from your goals at the top.

• In the early stages of the buyer journey, you’re trying to get as many people as you can to view or engage with any content you put out there.
• In the later stages, those priorities flip. Now, you’re trying to get a relatively small number of people to engage as deeply as possible with as much targeted content as possible.

For instance, if this is the first time you’ve ever read one of our articles, you’re one of the many people engaging with one piece of our content. You’re in the top part of the hourglass.

But we hope you’ll join the relatively smaller group who reads a lot of our articles, watches our videos, and even reaches out to us for more information. Then you’d be in the bottom part of the hourglass — and (congratulations!) on our very short list of potential clients.

That’s why conventional awareness and engagement KPIs are irrelevant in the bottom part of the hourglass. We’re far less interested in how many people are reading this article, and far more interested in who you are, how many people in your organization you’re sharing it with, and how deeply you engage with the article.

How do we measure that? Well, we’re not going to share all our secrets. But let’s look at a hypothetical example of how one asset can generate KPIs relevant to both parts of the hourglass — a webinar:

Top-of-hourglass metrics:

• Landing page views
• Registrations
• Attendance

Bottom-of-hourglass metrics:

• How many people from the same organization attended?
• Who stayed through the full webinar?
• Who asked questions?

With the focus on opportunity and fit rather than volume, your digital metrics will usually get more closely tailored to your offering as a lead gets closer to becoming a customer. You may have to invent your own KPIs.

That’s where you may require a personalized touch from a marketing team that deeply understands your goals, your industry, and your audience.