John Davis
We all know that data is the key to effective marketing. To get the best ROI from every campaign, you need to constantly gather data, identifying exactly what works, and what doesn’t. Today, though, old-fashioned digital marketing metrics (vanity metrics) won’t give you the insights you need.
At Today Digital, we’ve been advising against an over-reliance on vanity metrics for years. Now that AI is changing the marketing game on a phenomenal scale, the value of these metrics has dwindled even further. Monitoring clicks, impressions and page views will leave you with limited results in a world where AI-powered search is cannibalizing clicks.
The only way to truly understand your audience and gain the data you need to create campaigns that drive not only conversions, but loyalty – is with a new approach to attribution and metric tracking.
Attribution in the Age of AI: How AI Creates Confusion
AI’s impact on the publishing landscape for B2B content creators has been huge. On the one hand, AI is making it easier for companies to create engaging content at scale.
Tools like Copilot and ChatGPT give us an excellent way to draw insights from genuine conversations with customers with transcriptions and summaries. Plus, multimodal solutions are giving businesses a convenient way to transform content into multichannel assets they can share across various platforms.
At the same time, though, AI is making it harder to reach your customers. We’re living in a world where ChatGPT, Siri, and even Google’s new AI overview service can instantly answer customer questions, without ever redirecting customers to a company’s website.
Even if a buyer eventually stumbles onto your website and makes a purchase, it’s difficult to know what kind of content guided them through their journey. How do you know for certain which of the content you’ve created has been referenced or adapted by AI throughout the buyer journey?
How can you see each stage of the attribution funnel fully, when AI creates significant “blind spots” in your interactions with customers?
Already studies show that AI-summarized search results have led to companies losing anywhere up to 70% of their search engine traffic. A lack of clicks from search engine results, and even PPC ads could convince you that your strategies aren’t working. However, those assets could still be contributing to awareness and engagement that eventually results in conversions.
The Future of Digital Marketing Metrics and Attribution
In an AI-driven landscape, intelligent tools are streamlining the buyer journey, providing customers with the exact content they need to make decisions faster. Undoubtedly, this will lead to fewer clicks, and impressions gained from strategic content assets.
The good news? This will force B2B tech marketers to reduce their reliance on vanity metrics once and for all. Thousands of page views and clicks look good at first – but they’ve never really told marketers much. Just because someone sees a blog article or social media campaign, doesn’t mean they’re really connecting with your company.
As AI drives down clicks and “visibility”, you’ll need to start focusing on the real deal – the metrics that track quality, meaningful interactions with your consumers.
Forget vanity metrics in 2025 (the empty carbs of marketing). Instead, focus on insights into the connections you’re building with customers, by monitoring:
Attention Metrics
47% of brands in 2024 said they were concentrating more on “attention metrics” to measure marketing performance. Attention metrics aren’t the same as clicks and views. They dive deeper into how your customers are actually consuming the assets you create.
Leading companies are beginning to use eye-tracking solutions, facial coding, and heart rate monitors with focus groups to understand how customers view their content. Even on a smaller scale, there are apps and tools that can monitor everything from cursor position to scroll depth to provide insights into how actively consumers are “consuming” your content.
Engagement Metrics
Engagement insights are the holy grail for digital marketing metrics in 2025. Realistically, engagement is the only thing that truly matters for B2B tech brands. If customers aren’t actively “engaging” with your company, they’re never going to purchase your products.
Go beyond simply measuring bounce rates and how long customers spend on your website. Look at comments on social media, shares and likes, email open rates, response rates, and video views. Find out how many customers are coming back to your website for more, and how frequently people attend webinars or search for your brand online.
Look at how engagement levels evolve when you personalize content for specific customer segments and channels. A/B test your campaigns with a focus on driving real human connections.
Relationship Metrics
Finally, relationship metrics focus on the impact of the connections you’re building with your customers. They’re closely connected to “customer satisfaction” metrics, and cover things like retention rates, customer churn rates, and even net promoter score.
Pay attention to how your category-defining content is driving referrals from customers, and strengthening trust in your ecosystem. Look at how your customer lifetime value increases based on the assets you create. Are you just converting customers, or are you turning them into long-term advocates for your brand?
Focusing on building in-depth relationships with customers, through personalized, omnichannel strategies that cover the entire customer journey leads to more than just increased revenue. It can help reduce your customer acquisition costs, and give you more “ownership” over your community. When customers trust your brand, they’ll side-step AI-generated content, and search for insights straight from the source (your company).
Navigating the Future of Digital Marketing Metrics
To really make the most of your digital marketing strategy in the age of AI attribution challenges, you need to do more than simply shift away from vanity metrics. It’s time for B2B tech marketers to completely transform their marketing strategies.
Beyond rethinking how you measure digital marketing performance, you’ll also need to revolutionize multi-touch measurement, and learn how to work with the bots.
Rethinking your Multichannel Marketing Strategy
Consumers are everywhere—email, social, search, and now, AI platforms. For B2B marketers, this means a single-channel focus won’t cut it. You need a cohesive, omnichannel strategy that tracks engagement across multiple platforms and adapts to new social ecosystems.
Start with updating your email marketing strategy. Let’s face it—traditional email open rates are down. But that doesn’t mean email is dead. Focus on high-value content that creates a sense of exclusivity and personalization. Think beyond the generic newsletter—send tailored insights that speak directly to your recipient’s role and business goals.
Most importantly, don’t rely exclusively on email to connect with existing audience members. Look at your social media marketing strategy. LinkedIn might still be king for B2B audiences, but platforms like Meta Threads and Reddit are also emerging, focused on community-led experiences.
These channels will become increasingly crucial in the years ahead, as traditional social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and even TikTok prioritize “content creators” over brands. Look for new ways to reach your community on emerging platforms. Transform your content into different types of media, from audio clips to videos, to expand your reach.
Embrace Personalization and Data-Driven Storytelling
AI solutions like Google’s AI overview can answer customer questions in seconds, making it unnecessary for customers to connect directly with your company, or click on your links. If you’re producing basic, generic content, you’ll never engage and convert customers.
So dive into your data, and focus on personalization at scale. Take advantage of the unique insights you have into your target audience, by transcribing and summarizing conversations with AI, and using genuine insights as the foundation for your articles, videos, and posts.
Prioritize telling genuine, authentic stories, with real insights that no other company will have. Truly unique, personalized, and data-driven storytelling is almost impossible for AI solutions to replicate entirely. Even if AI systems can summarize and draw insights from your content, you’ll benefit from customers searching for the “source” of the statistics they read about.
Beyond creating more unique content, focus on end-to-end interactive experiences, built for your customers. Create unique buyer guides, videos, and webinars that can’t be replicated and shared in an AI overview. This will help you to build stronger relationships with your customers.
Work with AI when Measuring Digital Marketing Metrics
AI is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it’s making life harder for marketers and B2B tech companies, by creating new barriers that make it harder to reach your audience. On the other hand, AI can help you transform in the new age of digital marketing metrics.
Countless journalists and content creators are already using AI to optimize content for different channels, and improve SEO results. Some have even begun creating content specifically with a focus on adhering to the needs of “AI search engines”. If you make it easy for AI to summarize your content, but also include clear statistics and facts in everything you publish, AI overviews will link customers to your website, giving you new touchpoints to access.
AI can also help refine your attribution strategy. Intelligent tools can anticipate which marketing strategies are most likely to work based on engagement trends, previous behaviors and customer profiles. They can assist with real-time journey mapping, going beyond first or last-touch attribution models to consider every intersection between you and your audience.
Plus, they can help you go beyond traditional digital marketing metrics, with insights into customer sentiment from conversations, NPS scores, and customer satisfaction rates.
Measuring Digital Marketing Metrics in 2025: Quick Tips
Staying one step ahead of not only your competition, but the AI revolution in 2025 isn’t going to be easy. You’ll need to take a proactive approach to adjusting how you create content, collect data, and measure marketing results. Here are our top tips to keep in mind:
- Update your attribution model: Old-school attribution models are limited. Multi-touch, AI-enhanced attribution tools are now essential, giving you an insight into each touchpoint from awareness through to conversion.
- Focus on relationship and engagement-driven metrics: Forget clicks and views. Focus on the metrics that show you’re building genuine connections with your customers. Monitor brand sentiment, community-driven KPIs, and engagement.
- Use AI to your advantage: AI enables real-time personalization that turns engagement into conversion. By delivering hyper-relevant content exactly when customers are looking, you strengthen relationships and boost ROI.
- Embrace hyper personalization: Move away from one-size-fits-all marketing. Get to know your customers, answer their questions, and position yourself as the most trustworthy partner for their entire buyer journey.
- Experiment with new platforms: Double down on proven engagement channels like LinkedIn, but don’t forget to look beyond the “traditional” channels. Experiment with platforms like Meta Threads, Reddit, and even TikTok to strengthen relationships.
Adapt and Thrive: Measuring Marketing in 2025
For years, B2B tech leaders have struggled to leave vanity metrics behind. We all love the feeling of seeing a post on social media or a website get thousands of clicks, impressions, and views. But, as AI enters the game, you can’t afford to leave your digital marketing metrics in the past.
The AI-fuelled shakeup in the marketing landscape might seem threatening – but it’s actually an opportunity. It’s a chance for bold marketers to rewrite the rules, and focus their attention on building genuine relationships with customers that transcend future marketing shifts.
Yes, attribution is going to get tougher, and old-fashioned strategies will lose their spark. But it’s only the companies that resist the change that will truly suffer. Savvy marketers will dive head-first into the new landscape, adjusting their performance measurement strategies, and getting serious about engagement across a host of different channels.
This year is your chance to lead the pack. Be fearless with AI, go deep on metrics that show real ROI, and don’t be afraid to tear down your old playbook. Check out this article on LinkedIn for more insights, or reach out to the Today Digital team to revolutionize your marketing strategy for 2025.
The future is wide open—time to make your mark.
