During my bout of unemployment in 2025, I was reviewing old resumes and found one highlight: "Exceeded client goal of 80 million annual connections as part of content strategy." I remember the work vividly — the client, the strategy, the team, the ups, the downs.

And I still have no idea what "connections" are. It was a key performance indicator (KPI) the client came up with, which we hit and occasionally exceeded, and everyone seemed pleased.

You know, marketing.

The "connections" thing has stuck with me for years — not because it's embarrassing (even though it is), but because it represents something endemic to marketing. We are a discipline happy to invent a metric, agree to it in a conference room, exceed it, celebrate it, and then forget what it meant. And if you ask what it actually indicated about business performance, everyone is offended you would even ask.

“Of course this [vanity metric] is the best indicator of [business objective]! It’s the one we've always used!”

The other thing we all do (not just marketing, I’m sure) is show the numbers that trended in the right direction, state why those are the important ones this time, and hope no one asks about those other numbers from before that, this time around, didn’t trend in the right direction.

We chase some metrics because they're easy, impressive-looking, and difficult to argue with. Nobody's going to question a chart that goes up and to the right, even if the metric it's tracking is essentially meaningless. Eventually we accumulate seventeen “key” performance indicators instead of two, and still can't tell the CEO whether the campaign worked.

I am encouraged by some of the discussion around the death of likes and impressions and follower counts, and why we should finally stop caring about them. Catherine Kehoe for The Institute of Practitioners in Advertising writes, "our industry is happily celebrating all the reposts and the likes and PR coverage it generates, and passing them off as symbols of modern-day effectiveness. Sadly, in a world where 90% of clicks to most forms of mobile display advertising are accidental, everyone here knows the reality is very different."

This impulse is correct, but I think the conversation is often aimed at the wrong target. This isn’t (just) a marketing problem.

If your company has clear, specific, shared business objectives with corresponding KPIs that everyone — marketing, sales, operations, finance, leadership — has signed off on, then all that metrics work has already been done for you. You don’t need to scramble to decide how you’re going to defend your work, you don’t need to retrofit any results into what you were hoping to accomplish, and you don’t need to spend any time justifying that these KPIs are the ones that actually matter.

Your company, as a whole, should have alignment around that — including how marketing’s work to drive brand awareness among the target audience and generate qualified leads fits in.

The good news is that marketing can be a great vanguard for having that discussion. The other good news is that the answer is boring simple: pick a small number of metrics that are clearly tied to established business objectives, be honest about what they can and can't tell you, and then look at whether they're trending in the right direction over time.

You're not going to achieve perfect measurement. You're not going to find the one metric that finally makes the CFO nod along in satisfaction. What you can do is be a competent, clear-eyed reader of imperfect data, get internal alignment with relevant stakeholders around what it indicates, and resist the temptation to hide behind the dashboard when someone asks if marketing is working.

Set the example for everyone else. Marketing can be the function that demands clarity around (and provides recommendations for) meaningful business objectives, pushes for alignment, and shows we actually understand how the business works. There is value in asking the questions nobody else thought to ask.

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