At Better B2B South, the panel discussions gave us lots to think about. The morning panel ‘Is organic traffic dead? Rethinking B2B marketing metrics in the AI era‘ helped reframe where measurement sits for B2B marketers today.

The metrics we grew up with are breaking

For years, two numbers sat at the heart of most B2B marketing reports: organic traffic and marketing qualified leads (MQLs). Traffic showed that people were finding you. MQLs showed that some of them were interested enough to fill in a form.

Both are now under pressure. Buyers do much of their research inside AI tools rather than on vendor websites. G2’s 2026 Answer Economy report found that 51% of B2B software buyers now start their research with an AI chatbot more often than with Google. When an AI summary appears in Google, Pew Research Center found that users click a traditional result in just 8% of visits, compared with 15% when no summary appears.

So the gated guide that used to generate a steady stream of MQLs gets fewer downloads, because buyers can get the same answer elsewhere. And when buyers do arrive and get in touch, they know far more about you than they used to.

That raises an uncomfortable question. Which B2B marketing metrics still deserve a place in your reporting?

During the event, Hallam’s CEO Jake Third chaired a panel to debate exactly that, with:

  • Freya Ward, Associate Managing Director at Headley Media
  • Karen Allsop, Fractional CMO & Marketing Leader
  • Giorgia Guantario, Head of Marketing at UpSlide

Here is what they told us.

Is organic traffic still worth measuring?

Freya opened by naming the elephant in the room. Organic traffic is falling for most individual websites, and we have to acknowledge it. But she drew an important distinction between quantity and quality. If the visitors who do arrive are more qualified and convert more often, is a drop in volume really cause for panic?

Giorgia went further. In her view, traffic was never a particularly valuable metric. Her CEO has never once asked about it. What he cares about is whether the right-quality leads are coming through the door, so her team optimises for qualified opportunities and annual recurring revenue (ARR).

When Jake asked the audience whether their leadership asked about organic traffic, the room split roughly 50/50. That alone says a lot about how inconsistent marketing reporting has become.

Falling traffic is not automatically bad news. If lead quality and conversion rates are rising, traffic is a diagnostic, not a goal.

Should B2B marketers still optimise around MQLs?

This was where the debate got interesting, because the panel genuinely disagreed.

The case for keeping MQLs, in their place

Karen took a step back. After 25 years, she has watched channels and labels change constantly, but the core of what businesses care about has not moved: revenue, profit and growth.

She is not against MQLs or traffic. She simply sees them as leading indicators. Track them closely inside the marketing team, but report upwards in the language of the board.

Freya, a self-confessed “queen of MQLs”, agreed they have a place, while admitting the label itself has a terrible reputation. Headley Media sells MQLs, and she spends much of her time convincing people otherwise. Her point was that the right metric depends on your business, your niche and who you are talking to.

The case for ditching them altogether

Giorgia did something many marketers only talk about. Without being asked, she told her CEO she would no longer report on MQLs.

UpSlide had historically been sales-led, with marketing seen as a support function. Reporting MQLs did nothing to change that, because sales did not care about leads that never turned into opportunities. Switching to qualified opportunities created alignment with sales almost immediately, and the sales team began to respect marketing’s numbers.

Her team still looks at MQLs, but only as a diagnostic, working backwards to find leaks when something goes wrong.

Jake shared Hallam’s own experience. When we repositioned from a generalist agency to a B2B specialist, MQL volume dropped sharply. But lead quality and average order value rose, and overall revenue grew. We have written more about this in the case against the MQL.

MQLs can still be a useful diagnostic for the marketing team. They rarely belong in a board report.

A KPI pyramid for every stakeholder

So what should you actually measure? Karen offered the most practical framework of the session: a simple, three-level KPI pyramid. The idea is that different stakeholders need different metrics, and sharing the wrong ones with the wrong audience causes problems.

Level one: board metrics

At the top sit the metrics boards actually care about: revenue, profit and growth (or ARR for subscription businesses). This is where you show marketing’s contribution in commercial terms.

Level two: sales and marketing alignment

The middle layer covers shared commercial metrics such as qualified opportunities, pipeline velocity and revenue conversion rates.

Karen’s advice here is to avoid getting dragged into paid-versus-organic or sales-versus-marketing attribution debates. Instead, segment by what matters to the business, such as product range, geography or customer type. If you do not suggest a sensible segmentation, your CEO will likely suggest their own.

Level three: operational metrics

The base of the pyramid holds your leading indicators: traffic, engagement, MQLs and channel metrics. Monitor them closely, because they tell you whether you are heading in the right direction.

But share them with caution. Karen’s experience is that once senior stakeholders see these numbers, they latch on to them and the conversation drifts away from what matters.

There is no one-size-fits-all report. Match each metric to the audience that can act on it.

Practical tips to improve your marketing reporting

The panel shared several tactics that any B2B team can put into practice.

Use an LLM as a reporting coach

Freya’s favourite AI use case is surprisingly simple. Remove any sensitive information from your slide deck, then ask an LLM to critique it from the point of view of the person you are presenting to, whether that is your CFO, CEO or CMO. It helps you translate marketing metrics into the language your audience cares about. As she put it, marketers need to become bilingual inside their own businesses.

Dig into lead leakage

Freya also argued that lead rejection is one of the most undervalued metrics in B2B. Huge numbers of leads disappear because sales decide they are not ready. Rather than just tracking the rejection rate, find out why each lead was rejected and what marketing can do to re-engage it.

At Headley Media, sales must complete a mandatory field in Salesforce whenever they push a lead back. It offers five or six simple, slightly light-hearted categories such as “ghosted”, “not right now” and “budget”. A nurture manager then reviews the data and talks to individual salespeople about patterns.

Review leads weekly, not monthly

Giorgia’s team reviews rejected and accepted leads with sales every week. They discuss why each one was good or bad, optimise towards the good ones and catch the occasional lead that should not have been rejected. Waiting for month-end reporting means finding problems too late to fix them.

Bring the numbers to life

Karen’s tip was to pair data with real stories. Read what leads actually wrote. Mention specific deals alongside revenue figures. Numbers matter, but people remember customers.

The panel’s top KPIs, and the ones to bin

In a quick-fire round, each panellist picked three KPIs to optimise around and one to throw away.

  • Giorgia: ARR, qualified opportunities and branded search. In the bin: website traffic.
  • Karen: customer acquisition cost (CAC) paired with lifetime value (LTV), pipeline conversion and velocity, and share of voice in market. In the bin: website traffic.
  • Freya: lead rejection rate, share of voice and share of search as “indicators of tomorrow”, and cost per lead or acquisition. In the bin: any pure vanity metric. Once a board latches on to a vanity number, you have to keep performing against something you cannot meaningfully influence.

Run a CAC to LTV check

Jake added a practical tip. AI has made CAC to LTV analysis much easier to run. A commonly used benchmark is a ratio of around 3:1, meaning a customer’s average lifetime value should be roughly three times what it cost to acquire them. If your ratio is lower, or customers churn too quickly, your marketing spend may not be profitable.

When an audience member asked what to include, Jake was clear: take a full view from the P&L. That means sales and marketing salaries, budgets and ad spend, not just paid media CPA. Divide total sales and marketing cost by the number of new customers, then compare the result with the lifetime value of the same customer cohort.

Questions from the room

Starting a new role in a siloed business

One attendee had just joined an organisation with no clear overarching goals or metrics. Karen’s advice was to start with finance. In her experience, finance is the team boards trust most, and it nearly always holds the core numbers on revenue, profit, growth and customers. Build that relationship early, then shape your marketing metrics around the figures the business already believes.

Aligning reporting across dozens of markets

Another attendee works across 35 global markets, with teams reporting different metrics to different stakeholders. Giorgia recommended a single North Star metric. Each function can keep its own KPIs, but they should all ladder up to that one goal.

Freya added that alignment needs to be habitual. Talk about the North Star regularly across departments, not once a year.

Jake shared a technical fix that changed reporting at Hallam. We pull every marketing platform and our CRM into a BigQuery data warehouse, creating a single source of truth. With that foundation in place, building tailored dashboards for different stakeholders with AI becomes quick and easy.

Measuring brand for the 95% who are not buying yet

At any given time, the vast majority of B2B buyers are out of market. We often cite the figure of 95% of buyers being out of market at any moment. So how do you prove you are building mental availability with them?

Karen pointed to share of voice. Be very clear about your category and how customers describe it, then track mentions against competitors. Tools such as Brandwatch have long done this across channels. She also noted that boards tend to respond well when you show share of voice against their “nemesis” competitor.

Jake recommended Les Binet and Peter Field’s The Long and the Short of It, a landmark study on marketing effectiveness that links rising share of voice to market share growth. In Hallam’s client work, increases in brand investment have reliably been followed by revenue growth around six months later.

For AI search specifically, the panel suggested measuring share of LLM: how visible your brand is, compared with competitors, across a defined set of category prompts. Our guide to Share of LLM explains how to set this up.

Is AI changing which metrics matter?

The final question went back to the panel’s starting point. Is AI actually changing how we view metrics, or do the important ones stay the same?

Giorgia said AI has changed what her team optimises for, because traffic has plummeted. But the most valuable insight has come from a very low-tech change. Sales now ask every new prospect, inbound or outbound, “How did you hear about us?” The answers reveal word of mouth, ChatGPT searches and other journeys that no platform can track. The responses are stored in Salesforce, and AI makes the qualitative data easy to analyse.

Freya’s team does the same through a free-text field on website forms, asking where people heard about them or what they were searching for.

Her closing advice was to consider your niche. Are your decision-makers actually making final decisions inside LLMs, or just researching there because it is convenient? Optimise for AI, but do not treat it as your only channel.

Choosing the right B2B marketing metrics

The panel did not agree on everything, and that was the point. There is no single correct set of B2B marketing metrics. But the principles were consistent:

  • Report revenue, profit and growth to the board.
  • Use shared pipeline metrics to align with sales.
  • Keep traffic and MQLs as internal diagnostics.
  • Treat lead rejection as an opportunity, not a statistic.
  • Track brand through share of voice, share of search and share of LLM.
  • Ask buyers directly how they found you.

Most importantly, choose metrics your audience can act on, and tell the story behind them.

If you want to talk through how your reporting could better show marketing’s commercial impact, join the conversation in the Better B2B community or get in touch with the Hallam team.