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The State of B2B
Marketing
Measurement
2025
The State of B2B Marketing
Measurement
2025
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“What gets measured gets managed.” That famous quote linked strategy and execution with measurement decades ago, but its meaning is often misunderstood.
The phrase was used as a warning that an overreliance on quantitative metrics can lead to problems. It comes from a 1956 paper by V.F. Ridgway titled “Dysfunctional Consequences of Performance Measurements.”
Here we are in B2B marketing in 2025 – and the warning still rings true. Today, measurement serves as an invisible hand. What can and can’t be measured has far more impact on marketers’ strategies and tactics than they realize.
It’s with that in mind that we surveyed more than 200 B2B marketing leaders. We wanted to dig into the state of their measurement and look at how it relates to their marketing strategies, priorities, and budgets.
As a B2B marketer, it's hard to avoid the ever present debate about brand vs. demand. There are countless opinions and ideas for how to find the elusive balance between the short-term and long-term time horizons in marketing.
So it came as no surprise that this dichotomy showed up everywhere in the survey data.
In this report, we start by unpacking the top priorities for B2B marketers in 2025 before getting into budget allocation, KPIs, and how their measurement strategies contradict their stated priorities and get in the way of their ability to execute on them.
Finally, we investigate whether the MQL is actually dead, the biggest measurement challenges for B2B marketers, and how CMOs really feel about attribution.
Let’s begin.
Top Marketing Priorities
Before diving into marketing measurement, it’s important to set the stage by identifying the highest priority initiatives for B2B marketing leaders. These priorities form the foundation of marketing strategy and become pillars for what respondents are focused on measuring.
To pinpoint the top priorities, we need to understand two different components:
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How important each initiative is to respondents
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How effective they are today at each initiative
It’s the difference between the importance and the current effectiveness of each initiative that defines its relative level of priority, as marketing leaders work to close the gaps.
Going into 2025, it’s clear that the top priority for B2B marketing leaders is creating net new demand in the market.
This reflects the common knowledge that only a very small percentage (3-5%) of B2B audiences are in-market to buy at any given time. It demonstrates that marketing leaders are focused on educating prospects and increasing long-term interest in their solutions.
Coming in as the second-highest priority is capturing existing demand and generating leads. This comes as no surprise to see as a critical priority for marketing leaders, as we’ll explore in detail throughout the report.
Increasing brand awareness was rated as the third-highest priority in the survey.
When we dig deeper into the data, we see that the initiatives of creating new demand and increasing brand awareness share a similar profile.
They’re the two initiatives that respondents rated themselves as the least effective at today.
This makes sense – both are more nebulous in terms of how to execute and measure (i.e., connect to business outcomes).
Beyond the top three initiatives, the next highest priorities are enabling our sales team to effectively sell and creating and distributing content to drive demand. While they are tied for the fourth-highest priority, there’s a major difference depending on the size of the company.
Sales enablement is a much higher priority in large companies (>$100M ARR), while content marketing is significantly higher in small companies (<$50M ARR).
Large companies tend to be more siloed in terms of the responsibilities between sales and marketing. Especially when selling into Enterprise accounts, marketing is asked to take a larger role in enabling the sales team. At the same time, content marketing is part of the support system, but not expected to drive short-term business outcomes.
In small companies, however, content marketing plays a more substantial role. It’s used as a strategy more directly to both create and capture demand. Meanwhile, the smaller deals and shorter sales cycles don’t require as much marketing support on open sales opportunities.
The Great Debate: Brand vs. Demand Budget
With all of the conversation about Brand vs. Demand in the B2B marketing zeitgeist, we wanted to compare how companies are allocating their budget across both.
We asked:
“Approximately what % of your marketing budget is allocated towards demand capture / lead generation vs. demand creation / brand marketing?”
Across every seniority level and company size, respondents stated that they spend twice as much budget on demand capture / lead generation vs. demand creation / brand marketing (67% vs. 33%).
On the surface, it’s not surprising to see that B2B marketers are spending significantly more of their budget on lead generation than brand marketing. But this goes directly against the top priorities, where respondents identified creating new demand as their highest priority over capturing demand.
Wanting to understand more, we asked a follow-up question as to why their budgets were so imbalanced. The response was clear:
71% of CMOs say that they pursue marketing tactics that they can measure more easily.
This is a statement that demand capture is much easier to measure than brand marketing – and is the key reason why B2B marketers overweight their budgets towards demand capture.
Marketing KPIs
To measure the effectiveness of any business strategy or function, a decision needs to be made on what metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) will be used.
According to the data, the most frequently used KPIs for B2B marketing leaders are:
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Lead / MQL Volume (80%)
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Opportunities / SQLs (75%)
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Marketing Sourced Pipeline (63%)
Those top three KPIs are far more prevalent than every other option provided. No other metric was identified as a KPI in more than 50% of respondent’s companies.
The common thread among these top three KPIs is two-fold. They are volume-based metrics that speak to marketing’s effectiveness at capturing demand – and they are easily measured using attribution.
Additionally, despite thought leaders calling for the death of the MQL, it’s still very much alive and well in 2025. MQL volume is a marketing KPI in 4 out of every 5 B2B companies, and is the most frequently identified KPI across every size of company.
Beyond the top three KPIs, there are two key themes we see in the data:
1. The concept of Marketing Influence becomes much more important in large companies (>$100M ARR). Higher average deal sizes along with longer and more complex sales cycles leads to a greater emphasis on measuring marketing’s impact on supporting sales in addition to directly sourcing new opportunities.
2. Across the board, tracking marketing’s impact on pipeline is much more important than following all the way down to closed-won revenue. With long sales cycles in B2B, marketing tactics may be months or even years removed from a deal closing. It makes more logical sense to shorten the feedback loop down to the handoff to sales, when pipeline is identified.
If we connect back to the top priorities, creating new demand was identified as the highest priority for B2B marketers. However, not a single one of these KPIs measures demand creation – they are all aligned with demand capture.
Measurement Pain Points
Measuring B2B marketing is a complex endeavor that requires technological and human cooperation and alignment across an organization.
So, we wanted to zoom in on the challenges that companies face on this topic in a handful of functional areas.
The top pain point faced by B2B marketing leaders going into 2025 is effectively measuring demand creation / brand marketing, with 55% of respondents identifying it as a challenge for them.
By comparison, just about half as many respondents (28%) stated that they struggle to effectively measure demand capture / lead generation.
This is consistent with the rest of the survey data.
Attribution is a straightforward way to measure demand capture, making it much less of a challenge for companies. But when it comes to measuring demand creation, there isn’t a widely adopted solution today.
With essentially all B2B marketing KPIs measuring demand capture, everything related to brand marketing is considered to be a vanity metric by comparison. The impressions, views, reactions, shares, and clicks that marketers can measure today are considered “interesting” – but they aren’t connected to business outcomes.
Our inability to measure demand creation has significant downstream implications. It causes a major challenge for 45% of B2B marketers to get buy-in for brand marketing.
In addition, not being able to measure so much of the buyers’ journey makes it very difficult to set expectations and targets with executive leadership, as 48% of respondents stated in the survey.
Vibe Check: Attribution
One of the most heated topics today is the state of attribution as it applies to measuring B2B marketing. So we were curious about marketing executives’ experience and perspectives on this measurement approach.
The first stat that stood out was that 97% of CMOs stated that they know attribution doesn’t tell the full story.
While we had a hunch that marketing leaders were aware of the limitations of attribution, we were not expecting nearly unanimous agreement.
The lack of visibility in attribution is not a limitation of the technology, nor any particular vendor.
It comes from the requirement that an individual self-identifies through a conversion in order for any marketing tactic to be tracked in attribution. Yet so much of the B2B buyers’ journey are activities that are not attributable to an individual – and therefore not visible through attribution software.
This incomplete picture creates a challenge for marketing leaders who rely solely on attribution to measure the impact of their work. They cannot determine which tactics and channels are working for them – and which ones aren’t.
These limitations of attribution seem to have a direct impact on its trustworthiness, as only 38% of respondents said that they trust what their attribution tells them.
This was a bit of a surprising finding because last touch attribution doesn’t produce false positives – meaning that it doesn’t claim conversions that didn’t happen.
This result shows that it is the incomplete picture that attribution provides that causes mistrust of the data. This likely speaks to Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA) as well where the promise of seeing the entire buyers’ journey is a clear misrepresentation.
Finally, only 21% of CMOs stated that they are satisfied with what attribution provides them.
Taken together, these are strong statements on how B2B marketing leaders feel about attribution today. Unfortunately, the ability to positively identify the actions of prospective customers through their journey is only getting harder for a variety of technical reasons:
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Visibility: strict data privacy laws, third-party cookies going away, and ad blockers prevent marketers from being able to know who engaged with their campaigns
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AI: ChatGPT, Google’s Instant Results, and other forms of Conversational AI all serve direct information to prospects bypassing their need to visit vendor websites directly
None of this takes into account the evolution of the buyers’ journey over time: it has shifted into researching and identifying potential solutions from colleagues, communities, third-party review sites, and social media – with much less reliance on engaging directly with vendors.
The key takeaway here is that B2B marketing leaders have a glaring need for new ways of measuring marketing outside of attribution, particularly for measuring brand marketing and the long-term impact of marketing tactics on business outcomes.
Final Thoughts
B2B marketing leaders made a clear statement with their top priority being to create net new demand in the market for their products and services.
But throughout the data, we see many examples where their actions and strategies contradict their stated priorities:
They’re spending twice as much of their budgets on capturing demand over creating it, and all of their top KPIs align with lead generation and demand capture.
So did respondents misrepresent their top priority?
No – the discrepancy is due to a number of factors that are largely outside of the control of B2B marketing leaders.
As mentioned, demand capture KPIs have come to be largely accepted and standardized throughout B2B companies, relegating everything else to second-rate vanity metric status. They’re seen as “filler” in marketing reporting – reflecting marketing’s output, but unable to be connected to business outcomes.
Meanwhile, the MQL and marketing-sourced pipeline targets for B2B marketing leaders are measured quarterly. While this mimics the cadence of measuring sales, it forces marketing to prioritize short-term demand capture at the expense of brand marketing and long-term business growth.
Even more critically, the quarterly cadence is completely misaligned with the long and complex buyer journeys in B2B.
On the technical side, attribution is the standardized approach and toolset used to measure B2B marketing. Attribution misses the large majority of the buyers’ journey and has low trust from B2B marketing executives, as we saw in our survey.
While attribution can effectively measure conversion events, it has no visibility into the impact of brand marketing, or for the long-term impact of marketing tactics.
B2B marketers have been put in a difficult position, to say the least. They’re held accountable to only demand capture KPIs, that are measured on a short-term cadence, and their toolset to measure only has visibility into direct conversions.
It’s no wonder why creating demand can be the top priority for B2B marketers, while all of their execution and budget is centered on demand capture.
So what will it take for B2B marketing to be able to satisfy their top priority of creating new demand in the market?
First, there need to be new approaches to measure B2B marketing. Attribution is a useful tool for measuring the demand capture metrics, but it can’t effectively measure brand marketing and has no insight into how demand is created.
B2B marketers need a way to measure the long-term impact of their marketing tactics. These new measurement approaches will generate new metrics connected to demand creation.
In addition, B2B marketing leaders need to educate their executive stakeholders on the importance of these new ways of measuring marketing, and work to get new KPIs adopted to create a balanced marketing scorecard to represent demand creation and brand marketing – in addition to demand capture.
At that point, marketers will be able to develop strategy, allocate budget, and execute long-term tactics separate from the short-term ones. Attribution can still be used to effectively measure demand capture, while the new methods and tools will be used to measure brand marketing and marketing’s impact on creating demand.
About Boundary Analytics
Boundary is an analytics platform that allows B2B marketers to measure the long-term pipeline impact of all of their marketing tactics. Using correlation modeling and time lag analysis, B2B marketers can break through the limitations of attribution to see where demand is created – and when. With Boundary, brand marketing is finally measurable.
Audience Breakdown
About Sirkin Research
Sirkin Research is a quantitative research firm for B2B companies. Specializing in product-specific surveys, our insight helps clients create content across the entire customer journey, develop positioning and targeted messaging, and learn what matters most to their ideal customers.