Cut through the noise of clicks and impressions — learn how to report on marketing performance in a way that drives strategic decisions and justifies your budget.
Introduction
One of the most common frustrations we hear from new and prospective clients is that they don’t have clear insight into their marketing performance. Sure, their marketing team may tell them the number of clicks, impressions, or click-through rate, but they might as well be speaking a foreign language. It’s unusable information for an executive team.
While technically accurate, these metrics don’t tell a story about how marketing contributes to top-line revenue — and when it comes to justifying or increasing marketing budgets, that’s what matters.
This article outlines the top metrics to report on, the tools that can help you get there, and how to turn raw data into actionable insights that drive decision-making.
What is Digital Marketing Analytics?
Digital marketing analytics is the practice of collecting, analyzing, and using data from your digital marketing channels to understand performance and guide strategic decisions.
It’s not about gathering all the data, it’s about gathering the right data. Data that’s aligned with business goals, not just platform KPIs. At its best, marketing analytics tells a clear story: what’s working, what’s not, and what changes might be most impactful.
Bridging the Marketing–Leadership Gap
In an ideal world, every team at a company works towards the same larger business goals and uses the same language and KPIs to get there. Even if you have the former, you’re likely missing the latter. Marketing teams often speak in terms of clicks, CTRs, and CPCs, whereas leadership looks for revenue growth, pipeline acceleration, and ROI. Differences in each team’s framing cause this disconnect.
Good marketing analytics bridges that gap. When done right, it allows marketing to:
- Speak the language of the business
- Demonstrate contribution to revenue
- Identify growth opportunities
- Justify and defend budget decisions
- Pivot quickly based on performance trends
It also builds trust between marketing and leadership while connecting data and action.
Marketing Metrics For Decision Makers
Here are the core metrics we recommend focusing on for executive-level reporting. They tell a story about efficiency, performance, and impact across the funnel:
1. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
How much are you spending to acquire each new customer? Break this down by channel and campaign when possible. If you’re limited by data availability for full costs, you may translate metrics such as cost per conversion.
2. Marketing-Attributed Revenue
What percentage of closed-won revenue is attributable to marketing efforts? This helps marketing prove its role in pipeline generation. Marketing efforts can include both paid (search, social, DSP, etc.) and unpaid (organic, web, email, etc.) digital strategies, as they often work together in a full-funnel approach.
3. Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)
Once you have an idea of how much of your revenue comes from marketing (or a specific channel), you can calculate ROAS by dividing that number by your total ad spend. This metric helps you allocate budget to the highest-performing channels based on marketing-specific ROI.
4. Conversion Rate by Funnel Stage
Understand where prospects are dropping off—from first touch to lead to customer. This can identify friction points in your user journey. This also helps pull in the sales team and break down silos between two teams who are integral to each other’s success.
5. Lead Quality or Pipeline Contribution
Not all leads are created equal. Track which channels generate high-quality leads that progress to later stages of the funnel. This also requires clear communication with the sales team as they may manage lead scoring and can provide useful feedback on the quality of new contacts.
If you have access to more resources, you might also look at things like customer lifetime value (LTV), funnel drop-off rates, marketing mix models, or multi-touch attribution.
Marketing Tools That Help You See (and Share) the Full Picture
You don’t need a massive martech stack, but you doneed tools that talk to each other and give you a centralized view of performance. Here are a few staples (most of them have free tiers as well):
- Google Analytics 4 (GA4) – A must for understanding web behavior and traffic sources. Be sure to pair this tool with Google Tag Manager (GTM) for more advanced tagging with ad pixels and the like.
- Looker Studio – Custom dashboards to visualize multi-source data in one place. Don’t be afraid to blend data from various sources or make new metrics and dimensions to get the right KPIs for your business goals.
- Funnel.io – A favorite of our analytics teams for pulling data from ad, CRM, and analytics platforms into one place. We love compiling and merging the data within funnel and then sending it out to our looker studio dashboards.
- CRM platforms like HubSpot or Salesforce – Tie marketing efforts to leads, deals, and revenue outcomes. While these platforms have dashboard tools, try using Funnel to pull them into a dashboard with your ad and web platform data to get a full funnel view of the customer journey.
- VWO – A platform that provides A/B testing, split URL testing, heat mapping, and other web optimization tools. Integrate this platform with GA4, GTM, and even your CRM to reap the benefits of how testing impacts your goals.
- Attribution tools – Whether you run ads on two ad platforms or more than 5, consider using additional attribution tools such as ad platform pixels, multi-touch marketing models, or marketing mix models based on your needs. Leadership often wants to hear where exactly the highest-value customers came from. Attribution tools provide those insights.
The real magic happens when you integrate these systems and map your reporting back to key business objectives.
Going Beyond Dashboards: The Power of Integrated Analytics
One-off reports from individual platforms can tell you how ads perform or how users behave on your site, but they rarely show the full story.
Integrated analytics brings together data from across your tech stack — ads platforms, website analytics, CRM, email platforms — and allows you to analyze performance across the full funnel. This is where real insights happen.
For example, imagine knowing not just that LinkedIn ads are generating leads but that they’re producing the highest-value closed-won deals in your CRM. That’s the kind of insight that helps you optimize spend and prioritize high-ROI activities.
To get there, consider tools that:
- Pull in data from multiple sources (e.g., Funnel.io, Supermetrics)
- Visualize cross-channel performance (e.g., Looker Studio)
- Tie marketing efforts directly to sales outcomes (via CRM integration)
When reporting on integrated cross-platform analytics, you stop guessing and start seeing the entire customer lifecycle, enabling highly impactful data-driven decisions.
Turning Insights Into Action
Having data is one thing. Acting on it is another. Here’s how to move from static reports to strategic decisions:
- Look for patterns — Instead of just checking individual metrics, zoom out and identify trends. Are certain campaigns or channels consistently driving both high engagement and meaningful business outcomes like qualified leads or revenue? Patterns like these can reveal what messaging resonates with your audience, which platforms are most efficient, and where to scale your efforts for better ROI.
- Identify drop-off points — If your site is getting traffic but lower engagement or fewer conversions, where are users losing interest? This is something to keep an eye on over longer periods. Short-term ebbs and flows happen, but longer-term patterns can signify issues in your user experience or the quality of traffic.
- Test and iterate — Use hypothesis-driven A/B testing to validate new strategies and creative approaches. Do campaigns driving to ebook landing pages have higher conversion rates or bring in higher quality leads than those driving to generic contact pages? Set a hypothesis and run a split URL test to verify.
- Reallocate budget based on outcomes — Shift investment toward channels or campaigns that deliver the best cost-per-revenue. If you see dramatic shifts in overall performance after reallocating budget, it may be due to impacts on the funnel. Perhaps you cut top-of-funnel ad spend in favor of bottom-of-funnel, which led to reduced conversions. This may highlight that some channels are critical for building an audience.
Make it a habit to close every reporting cycle with a review of “what we’re learning” and “what we’re changing.”
A Note on Privacy and the Role of First-Party Data
As data privacy regulations evolve — think GDPR, CCPA, and the upcoming phase-out of third-party cookies — the way we collect and analyze marketing data is changing fast. These shifts are reshaping how marketers track performance, measure attribution, and even build audiences.
That’s why first-party data (1PD) — data you collect directly from your customers and prospects through your channels — is becoming more valuable than ever. Unlike third-party data, often aggregated and purchased from outside sources, first-party data is reliable, consent-based, and future-proof. It sets the foundation for accurate, privacy-compliant analytics.
In other words, your CRM, website behavior tracking, and email engagement data aren’t just useful — they’re essential.
We’ll dive deeper into how data privacy laws are impacting digital marketing analytics and what you can do to stay ahead in an upcoming post. (Sign up to stay tuned!)
Final Thought: From Reporting to Real Impact
Strong marketing analytics isn’t just about reporting what happened — it’s about using data to make smarter decisions, faster. When you move beyond vanity metrics and build a system that integrates data across platforms, aligns with revenue goals, and respects evolving privacy standards, you give your marketing team a powerful voice at the leadership table.
It’s about making decisions with confidence, proving value with clarity, and showing how marketing is directly contributing to growth. That’s the kind of insight leadership teams value and act on.
