For too long, digital marketers have measured the value of their tools and their work based on what is ultimately an arbitrary metric: the qualified lead. And the qualified lead is similarly defined by arbitrary standards, like clicks and touches. It’s time for digital marketers to understand that the traditional benchmarks used to measure success just aren’t built for today’s digital buyers.
It’s time for marketers to stop worrying over ROI and start measuring success with marketing engagement metrics built for today’s digital buyers. And that means being able to measure a return on engagement.
Here’s why.
Why Traditional ROI Metrics Aren’t Enough For Modern B2B Buyers
Traditionally, digital marketers have projected, measured and evaluated success — including return on investment — with metrics and complex formulas designed to track one thing: leads.
In fact, according to an ON24 survey of more than 100 marketing professionals, 60% of respondents say the success of their events is measured either by the number of leads they generated (31%) or by how many sales conversions are initiated (29%).
And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. After all, marketing needs to provide a pipeline to sales and sales needs that pipeline to hit targets. Using metrics to predict the efficacy of generating qualified leads makes sense.
But these measures are imperfect. A visitor that hits a certain threshold of clicks, touches and emails opened doesn’t always mean that lead is qualified to go to sales. In fact, it doesn’t even mean they’re interested in your product.
And things get even trickier when you throw hybrid events into the mix, especially without the right hybrid event platform to unify digital and in-person data. When asked about their biggest concern with hybrid, 32% percent of survey respondents said it’s “figuring out what a hybrid event model will look like.”
Here’s a reality check: today’s buyers are primarily digital. They prefer to learn about your product and services on their own and when they’re ready, they’ll often reach out to your organization to begin the sales process.
Four Main Traits of Modern B2B Buyers:
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- They are digital-first
According to Gartner, buying groups spend the majority of their buying activities researching solutions online.
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- They are self-educating
With a wealth of resources available, buyers can quickly educate themselves on your products, solutions and standards without hand holding from sales.
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- They consume content on their own
Buyers are busy, meaning they’ll consume content at their own pace.
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- They create their own buying journey
Buying journeys are no longer a straight line from beginning to end. Buyers will jump in and out of your buying process at the drop of a hat.
Today’s qualified buyer isn’t defined by an arbitrary number of actions they’ve taken, but rather how engaged they are in the relationship with your brand.
Why Engagement Is the New Marketing Metric to Measure
The new marketing metric to measure is engagement — an evaluation of how invested a lead is in their relationship with your brand.
Don’t worry: measuring engagement doesn’t mean reinventing the wheel. It’s simply a matter of reengineering how we use the tools we have and rethinking the value of the metrics — clicks, downloads, etc. — currently used in digital marketing.
Let’s take a quick look at the tools that drive digital engagement, so that we can better understand the many benefits of utilizing marketing engagement metrics.
Drive a return on Engagement with Amazing Experiences
Today’s buyers live in a digital world. They Google, they Slack, they email. The advantage marketers have here is that they can often measure a good deal of digital interactions — especially when those interactions take place on owned channels.
But what drives real, genuine digital interactions today? Well, that’s a unified digital experience. And digital experiences aren’t a superficial element — if a visitor comes to your site, they should be able to immediately find the informative content they want to consume quickly and easily.
That content should be presented to them in an engaging way as well. That means providing comprehensive webinars filled with engagement opportunities as well as surfacing relevant content in a content hub.
The goal for the digital marketer today is to create an amazing digital experience that an audience will love, come back to and engage with.
But driving engagement is easier said than done. According to our survey, the most challenging part of running a digital event is getting audiences to engage (55%). How can they overcome this hurdle?
Let’s take a look at the five traits of great digital experiences.
The Five Traits of Great Digital Experiences
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- Branded
Digital experiences are the face of your company. They should share a consistent look, feel and emotional tone and put your brand in the best light. Often, that’ll mean investing in a clean design across your assets and events — from webinars to expo floor booths.
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- Interactive
Digital experiences should be interactive. That doesn’t mean simply allowing visitors to click around your experience and site, but providing them with the opportunity to talk directly with your organization. Chatbots, surveys, polls and webinars are great examples of interactive experiences.
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- Multimedia
Slides, videos — GIFs. Audiences have a lot of options when it comes to consuming content. Your digital experiences need to be just as varied as their tastes to drive engagement.
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- Multi-touch
Great digital experiences surround visitors with lots of content in lots of different ways and let them self-select the content they want to consume. By providing them with multiple options or “touches” we learn more about who they are and what they prefer.
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- Direct engagement
Direct engagement is the ability for your organization to effectively connect and engage with a lead. We’re talking about immediate, near-real-time one-to-one communication with sales and marketing.
Those are the five essential elements of a great digital experience. Now, let’s check out the metrics you’ll need to know to measure the engagement you’ll create.
The Five Key Engagement Metrics to Measure
When it comes to actual engagement metrics, there are five key categories to consider:
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- Time
Time spent on your brand is a significant indicator of engagement. If a lead quickly flips through a blog or an e-book — or even watches a short video — then they’re likely not ready for an outreach email or call.
That’s because short, one-off visits are exactly that: short, one-off visits.
Instead, track the cumulative amount of time an account spends with your digital experiences. Does a lead routinely return to a webinar series? Do they spend time interacting with your five-hour virtual conference? The longer they’re in an experience, the more likely they are to interact with your brand.
Average session duration can also provide a helpful lens into the depth of engagement during each visit, while bounce rate offers insight into how often users leave without taking further action — both are useful indicators for optimizing your content’s stickiness.
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- Touches
Time gives us touches. That is, the more time spent, the more likely your visitor will interact with the assets: e-books, white papers and case studies that you want them to see. By loading up digital experiences with touch opportunities, you provide visitors with multiple chances to engage with your brand on their own.
Pages per session is a useful companion metric here, helping you understand how thoroughly users are exploring your content ecosystem and whether they’re progressing through your intended experience paths.
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- Interactions
A touch is a good metric to measure. An interaction —whether by filling out a survey, responding to a poll or engaging in a chat — is even better.
Interactions allow marketers to learn something about the lead directly from the lead itself, not through conjecture. Engagement tactics can include one-to-one conversations, polls, surveys, live chat and more.
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- Intent
Marketers love a good intent signal. But a real intent signal isn’t just a click. It’s a cumulative set of actions that lead takes to show you where they are in their buyer’s journey.
The goal for digital marketers here is to cut down on the number of actions a lead needs to take to show intent. Provide audiences with engagement opportunities, like “Talk with Sales” CTAs, embedded demos and additional content.
All of these engagement opportunities can tell you a lot about where a lead is in their journey and how ready they are to take the next step.
Conversion rate is particularly important here as it helps to evaluate whether your intent-driven experiences are actually motivating leads to take meaningful next steps, like booking a demo or requesting a quote.
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- Actionability
Digital experiences serve one goal: to drive action. All of the intent signals, all of the interactions, the touches and time spent with experiences should inform your marketing and sales teams of what actions need to happen next to accelerate a lead further down the funnel.
Ask yourself: Does the data you’ve gathered throughout your experience provide you with the information you need to take action? Does it tell you where and how you can personalize outreach? Inform sales on what actions they can take?
Don’t Overlook Social Media Engagement Metrics
While we often focus on website visits, webinars and gated content when measuring digital engagement, social media is a critical (and often underutilized) data source for understanding your audience. Every like, share, comment and click is a micro-conversion, a signal that your message is resonating and your brand is building momentum in the right communities.
When evaluating social media engagement, it’s not enough to look at vanity metrics like follower count. Instead, pay attention to high-value engagement signals that reflect real audience interest and intent. Here are five essential metrics worth tracking:
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Click-through rate (CTR)
CTR shows how often users engage with a post and then take action by clicking through to your website, landing page or webinar registration. It’s a strong indicator of how compelling your call to action or headline truly is.
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Comments and shares
Comments suggest your content is sparking conversation, curiosity or emotion. Shares, meanwhile, mean your message was compelling enough for someone to spread it within their own network — both are clear signals of deeper engagement.
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Mentions and tags
When users organically mention your brand or tag your profile in a conversation, they’re signaling connection, relevance or influence. Tracking these interactions helps surface unsolicited sentiment and brand perception.
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Engagement rate
This compound metric (total engagement divided by reach or impressions) paints a clearer picture than raw likes or views. It shows how engaging your content actually is, relative to the number of people who saw it.
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Follower growth trends
Although not always an immediate indicator of ROI, steady follower growth, particularly during campaigns, can show that your content strategy is attracting and retaining the right audience over time.
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These social media engagement metrics aren’t just nice to have — they offer early indicators of campaign resonance, help validate messaging, and uncover which content themes are most likely to perform across other channels.
For ON24 customers, incorporating social signals into your engagement scoring model can enrich lead profiles and inform personalized content journeys. Use insights from high-performing social content to guide webinar topics, fuel nurture campaigns and even shape live Q&A formats that reflect what audiences are already talking about.
Measuring ROI and Attribution
Measuring digital engagement is only part of the equation. For modern marketers, the real question is: What impact is that engagement having on pipeline, revenue, and retention? Without clear ROI and attribution metrics, it’s impossible to connect your engagement efforts to business outcomes and even harder to justify continued investment.
To truly understand how digital experiences are contributing to marketing performance, you need to go beyond surface-level engagement and dig into attribution and ROI insights. Here are some core metrics to help you do just that:
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Cost per lead (CPL)
CPL helps you assess the efficiency of your digital campaigns by showing how much you’re spending to acquire a new lead. By comparing CPL across different engagement channels, such as webinars, paid media, or content syndication, you can identify which experiences are most cost-effective.
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Pipeline influenced or sourced
This metric reveals how much of your sales pipeline can be attributed to marketing engagement efforts. A sourced opportunity originates from a marketing touchpoint, while an influenced one interacted with marketing at some point during their journey. ON24 customers can track both using engagement data from webinars and digital experiences synced with their CRM.
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Customer acquisition cost (CAC)
CAC captures the total spend required to convert a lead into a customer. Tracking CAC alongside metrics like average deal size or customer lifetime value provides critical context on whether your engagement strategy is delivering sustainable growth.
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Multi-touch attribution
Engagement often doesn’t happen in a straight line, a buyer might attend a webinar, download a whitepaper, and read three blog posts before converting. Multi-touch attribution models assign value to each of those interactions, helping you understand the role engagement played at every stage of the funnel.
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Return on engagement (ROE)
An emerging metric for digital-first teams, ROE quantifies the business impact of content consumption and interaction. Using data captured across webinars, content hubs, and virtual experiences, ON24 allows marketers to connect audience behavior with real pipeline outcomes, turning attention into attribution.
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By building a performance framework that blends engagement analytics with ROI and attribution, marketers can move beyond vanity metrics and prove real business value. Not only does this strengthen alignment with sales, but it also empowers marketing teams to double down on the content and experiences that deliver results and cut the rest.
For ON24 users, this is where the platform’s analytics and CRM integrations shine. Whether it’s measuring the influence of a single webinar or evaluating a full digital campaign’s impact on pipeline, ON24 provides the data fidelity and depth needed to attribute success with confidence.
How to Turn Engagement Metrics into Actionable Strategy
It’s one thing to collect engagement metrics—it’s another to turn them into a roadmap for smarter marketing. Without a clear framework for interpreting and applying insights, even the most comprehensive data set won’t move the needle on pipeline or ROI. To truly harness the power of engagement, marketers need to move from passive measurement to proactive decision-making.
Here are some actionable best practices to ensure your engagement metrics inform smarter strategies and deliver measurable results:
Map Metrics to Funnel Stages
Not all engagement metrics carry the same weight at every stage of the buyer’s journey. Time-on-page or session duration may matter most at the top of the funnel, while demo requests and “Book a Meeting” clicks carry greater weight at the bottom. Identify which signals correspond to awareness, consideration and decision-making stages, and align your content strategy accordingly.
Set Benchmarks for Performance
Context is everything. A 3-minute average webinar view might be outstanding in one industry and below average in another. Use your historical data, industry reports (like ON24’s Digital Engagement Benchmarks), and platform benchmarks to understand what “good” looks like—then aim to beat it.
Segment Your Audience Insights
Dig beyond surface-level averages. Break down engagement data by account type, funnel stage, industry, and persona to uncover patterns. Maybe your tech vertical engages more with webinars while your financial audience prefers content hubs. These insights can—and should—direct your campaign planning.
Build Feedback Loops with Sales
Engagement insights should fuel sales conversations—not just marketing dashboards. Loop in your sales team with insights on top-engaged accounts, key content touchpoints, or signals of buying intent. Platforms like ON24 make this seamless with integrations that push real-time data into your CRM.
Test, Learn and Optimize
Engagement metrics are a powerful diagnostic tool. Use them to run A/B tests on content formats, CTA placements, or delivery times. Watch what resonates—and refine your strategy. Over time, small iterations based on audience behavior lead to compound performance gains.
Visualize Data to Tell a Story
Avoid getting stuck in spreadsheet mode. Use visual dashboards to bring your engagement data to life. Whether it’s heat maps of webinar interactions or engagement drop-off rates across your content journey, visual storytelling helps align internal teams and drive strategic clarity.H2: Optimizing for Return on Engagement
With these engagement metrics in mind, you can begin to optimize digital channels to drive engagement.
As always, sit down with your marketing operations and sales teams to discuss what engagement metrics are the most valuable indicators of a quality lead. As time goes on, you may discover some great insights.
For example, to drive its audience — advisors — to its webinars, John Hancock uses a three-two-one model for webinar emails. Advisors will get an invitation on a particular subject three weeks out from the main event, then a reminder of the event two weeks out and a final reminder a week before the event.
This may seem like a basic engagement strategy, but John Hancock increased conversion rates to its webinars by 25% by following this model. But the company didn’t just optimize its emails. Put together, its digital experiences — especially its webinar program — drove some pretty great results.
By optimizing its experiences, John Hancock:
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- Drew a 20% increase in meeting interest from cold leads
- Increased sales 5x from webinar attendees alone
- Increased business from virtual event attendees by 266%
- Reached more than 1,500 advisors within the past few months
So, it’s time to start measuring the marketing engagement metrics that matter. Start building your experiences today.
