An article by Ann Gyn, published by the Content Marketing Institute (original article)  – March 2026
Image : Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

Digital marketing gave marketers something they’d never had before: concrete numbers. But more than two decades in, leadership has moved the goalposts. Now, the C-suite expects more than activity counts — it wants to know what marketing actually contributes to revenue.

CEOs and CFOs rank ROI as their top priority and business outcomes as the No. 2 metric, according to marketers surveyed for The Language of Effectiveness 2025. Over half of marketers in that survey say their budgets increase when they focus on those priority metrics. 

Yet, a survey of 2,000 global marketers by Nielsen finds only 38% evaluate holistic ROI by measuring traditional and digital marketing together.

“Board rooms across the world are focused on understanding the actual causal impact of marketing and content on sales, not just on vanity metrics like impressions or earned media value,” says Michael Kaminsky, co-founder of Recast, a marketing measurement brand.

Now, with budgets tightening and AI disrupting how buyers find information, the gap between what marketers measure and what company leadership wants to know keeps growing — and the reasons why are more structural than most realize.

Why traditional marketing metrics miss the point

Pageviews, impressions, email open rates, and follower counts can show a lot of activity. They’re nice numbers because they show people responding to the brand’s marketing activities. They indicate that the work has had an effect.

But effect and impact are two different (yet commonly conflated) things. Increasingly, the C-suite is holding marketing accountable for the latter.

“Superficial metrics like email open rates, web traffic, and impressions are the communications version of checking your speedometer without consulting your GPS. You may be moving fast, but is it in the direction of your goal?” says Chintan Shah, president and managing partner of KNB Communications.

Lauren Henss, vice president of marketing and strategic partnerships at First Team Real Estate, agrees. “For enterprise organizations, especially, measurement systems that reward output over outcomes create a false sense of performance,” she says. “Content can look ‘busy’ in dashboards while having very little influence on revenue, pipeline, or customer behavior.”

Further, generative AI has fragmented the customer journey in ways that traditional measurement models cannot capture. For example, a prospect might encounter a brand in a ChatGPT conversation, discuss it over Slack, and weeks later conduct a branded search. 

Metrics the C-suite actually cares about

Executive leadership increasingly expects to see proof of content performance across four key dimensions: revenue-related impact, AI-driven visibility, customer experience, and operational efficiency.

Bottom-line benefits

“Measurement must be linked to revenue quality, customer lifetime value, retention, and a contribution to the pipeline,” says Mark Coffie, CEO and chief revenue officer at Magical Brands. “Board conversations don’t pay attention to vanity metrics of raw traffic or follower growth if they are not related back to sales conversion and/or repeat purchase behavior.”

Among the metrics to assess content’s impact on the bottom line:

• Content-influenced pipeline: Track deals where content played a role at any stage, not just the last touch.
• Content-assisted win rates: Measure whether prospects who engaged with content close at a higher rate than those who didn’t.
• Cost per qualified lead (defined in partnership with sales): Calculate the total marketing spend divided by leads that meet the agreed-upon criteria of sales-readiness.
• Repeat purchase rate tied to content engagement: Connect post-sale content to revenue retention, not just acquisition.
• Customer lifetime value attributed to content journeys: Assess how content produces better customers over time.

“In 2026, the right question isn’t ‘How did this perform?’ but ‘What business outcome did this influence?’” Lauren says.

AI discoverability

Revenue metrics tell the C-suite what content has delivered. AI visibility metrics tell them where there’s early potential for pipeline growth.

As buyers increasingly research through ChatGPT, Gemini, and AI Overviews, a brand’s presence in those conversations has become as commercially significant — and equally measurable — as its search rankings once were.

“Since AEO and GEO are top of mind, a recent push has been made to measure this metric. Because this is a critical immediate KPI, it has also become a long-term measure we have incorporated into our reporting,” Chintan explains.

These brand equity metrics in AI channels, where buyers more frequently begin their journey, include:

• Share of voice on brand-priority topics
• Prompt visibility and LLM-citation rates
• Content authority scores

Tracked over time, these metrics give leadership early visibility into where a future pipeline is forming — before it shows up in any CRM.

Audience relational health 

Leadership is also interested in how content impacts the brand’s customer relationships: Is it actively increasing engagement, trust, and loyalty or merely serving as a random stop along their journey? 

“In 2026, the more meaningful question is whether customer experience aligns with what marketing sets customers up to expect,” says Elaine Buxton, president and CEO of Confero, a customer research firm.

Among the metrics to assess content’s contribution to a favorable customer experience:

• Repeat contact rates and service friction points
• Abandonment rates post-campaign
• Customer retention and lifetime value are tied to specific content journeys
• Qualitative signals, such as resolution confidence and customer feedback on content relevance

Together, these signals give leadership a fuller picture of whether content is building the kind of customer relationships that sustain and increase revenue over time.

Efficiency gains

Finally, a fourth measurement dimension resonating with leadership is operational efficiency. In a climate where budgets are tighter, and AI is automating more of the content production process, the question has sharpened: Are the content assets marketing produces working as hard as possible for the cost?

Lauren says that efficiency metrics are becoming more important at the leadership level, including content reuse rates and support deflection driven by educational content.

“Successful organizations are moving toward a focused scorecard tied to revenue, authority, and efficiency rather than dozens of disconnected KPIs,” she says.

Why numbers alone aren’t enough

Revenue and efficiency metrics may tell leadership what is happening, but not necessarily why or whether the brand is building the kind of authority that doesn’t show up in a spreadsheet.

“Quantitative data shows scale and trend. Qualitative insight explains why it’s happening. Without context, numbers can mislead. Without scale, anecdotes can distort reality,” Elaine says.

Her firm put that qualitative-quantitative principle into practice for a multi-unit restaurant brand, combining mystery shopping data with aggregated customer feedback and operational metrics. The resulting measurement model surfaced both immediate performance gaps and longer-term trends.

“When messaging and execution drift apart, the data makes it visible, allowing teams to course-correct quickly,” she says.

That same mixed approach applies to authority metrics, which resist easy quantification. “Authority shows up qualitatively when your ideas start popping up in sales conversations, media coverage, analyst discussions, or industry dialogue,” Lauren says. “It’s the difference between publishing content and helping shape the conversation in your industry.”

For tracking softer signals over time, Michael recommends a constellation approach: Monitor LinkedIn followers, YouTube subscribers, newsletter growth, and self-reported attribution as a whole, without fixating on any single number or short-term fluctuation. The value isn’t in any one metric, but in what the pattern tells you about whether the overall strategy is on course.

“None of these metrics really gives us an ROI number, but they are very useful for making sure that the ship is broadly pointed in the right direction,” he says.

Sell the shift upward, across, and down

Knowing what to measure is one thing. Getting permission, budget, and cross-functional alignment — the prerequisites for implementing a new measurement strategy — is the hardest part.

Without agreeing on what content and marketing are responsible for, measurement will remain fragmented. “You absolutely must get the CEO and CFO on board with how you’re planning to measure the impact of marketing if you want to be able to ask for more budget and continued investment,” Michael says.

Mark uses a shared scorecard with agreed-upon definitions visible to all revenue leaders. “Finance should confirm how revenue is classified. Sales should set the criteria for what a true opportunity looks like, and operations should corroborate fulfillment capabilities,” he says.

Alignment sets the direction; infrastructure makes measurement possible. “The truth is it is not just one thing that makes someone evaluate or buy your solution. It’s a totality of interactions,” Joanna says. 

She uses Dreamdata to surface all lead touchpoints, from Google search to events to content interactions. Mark recommends CRM integration with marketing automation and finance systems to track leads from initial content contact through repeat purchase.

With alignment and infrastructure in place, the final prerequisite is a mindset shift — one that can be harder to achieve than any technical change. 

“Engagement and campaign performance are easy to track, and measuring business impact requires deeper collaboration across sales, products, and operations,” Lauren says. That collaboration, when it takes hold, changes how the entire organization thinks about content.

However, marketing leaders should be careful not to emphasize the new measurement strategy so much that team members abandon high-value work that can’t be easily quantified.

“There are lots of great types of marketing that can have a large impact or a strategic benefit that can’t be easily measured,” Michael says. “It’s great to make those investments, but you need to be explicit about what you’re assuming in order for the company to reap those long-term benefits.”

From cost center to growth agent

Marketing finally had numbers. Then, leadership started asking different questions. Fortunately, those questions now have answers.

The shift from activity metrics to impact metrics isn’t a reporting upgrade. It represents a repositioning of marketing itself. Revenue influence, AI authority, customer experience, and operational efficiency in a marketing measurement strategy speak the language of the boardroom rather than the dashboard.

“When that shift happens, content stops being viewed as a cost center and starts operating as a true growth system,” Lauren says.

And when marketing can prove it in numbers that leadership actually cares about, it stops defending its budget and starts driving the conversation around growth.