From vanity metrics to business outcomes

James Robinson - Managing Director, Hello Starling.

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For years, marketing reporting has been dominated by numbers that are easy to collect and easy to celebrate, such as impressions, clicks, likes, and video views, to name a few.

They look good on a dashboard, and they’re useful for evidencing delivery.

The problem is they often fail the only test that matters: did any of this change what people think, feel or do, and did it contribute to growth?

In 2026, the best marketing teams are shifting from platform metrics to commercial signals.

That doesn’t mean abandoning digital measurement; it means upgrading the scorecard so it reflects outcomes, not just activity.

Brand uplift to prove your marketing changed minds

If a campaign is designed to build awareness, consideration or trust, measure those things.

Brand uplift studies compare exposed versus unexposed audiences to quantify changes in awareness, preference and intent.

Even a simple pre- and post-wave survey can show whether the message landed and which audiences were impacted.

Keep it repeatable: a small set of questions you can track beats a one-off research project that isn’t updated for another 10 years..

Share of search

When more people search for your brand (or for category terms alongside it), mental availability is usually rising.

Share of search can be a useful leading indicator that brand activity is converting into intent.

Monitor branded search volume over time and, where possible, benchmark against competitors.

It isn’t perfect, but it’s often more meaningful than click-through rate.

Incremental reach – please, stop counting the same people twice!

A common trap is adding reach across channels as if audiences don’t overlap. In reality, campaigns often hit the same users while missing others.

Incremental reach asks a better question: how many new people did this channel add beyond what we already reached elsewhere?

Reporting this way helps you invest in channels that expand the audience, rather than simply inflating frequency.

Qualified demand

A click is not a customer, and a lead is not always a good one. Instead of reporting total leads, track qualified demand: enquiries that meet agreed criteria (budget, timeframe, location, seniority, fit).

Tie the definition with sales or customer service, then report conversion quality: enquiry-to-qualified rate, qualified-to-sale rate and cost per qualified outcome.

This connects spend to your pipeline, not just traffic that has visited your website.

Attention and engagement quality

Not every campaign is a direct response campaign, but engagement metrics still matter if you focus on quality.

Prioritise completed views over ‘views’, dwell time over clicks, and on-site behaviours (time on key pages, return visits) over general sessions.

These signals sit between brand and sales, indicating whether people actually consumed the message.

In 2026, keep delivery metrics for optimisation, but please, stop presenting them as success.

Build a scorecard that starts with the campaign’s real job (brand growth, incremental reach, or qualified demand), and your reporting will finally make sense to the people who control budgets.