Are Your Marketing KPIs Lying to You? How 'Success' Metrics Can Be Manipulated

In marketing, we love our KPIs. They provide structure, measure progress, and most importantly they justify our budgets. But what happens when the KPIs we track can be manipulated to paint a picture of success that doesn’t translate into actual business growth? 

Many marketing teams proudly report hitting their KPIs, only to face tough questions when revenue, customer retention, or ROI fail to match up. The issue? Not all KPIs are created equal, and some can be influenced to look great on a dashboard while wasting valuable resources. 

In the world of B2B marketing I’ve seen this first hand, when being lauded for overachieving to deliver a record number of ‘Marketing Qualified Leads’ (MQLs) against a basic volume/vanity KPI, only to show to the board of directors that 90% of those MQLs had come from the same organisation whereby a lead scoring system had provided points for clicking on every link in a marketing email.

Of course, this would have been an internal email tracking system falsifying the volume of clicks for every employee at that organisation, and none of those ‘qualified leads’ actually drove any pipeline or revenue. I was new to the business at the time, but by disproving this one metric that had been in place for many years, it spearheaded a complete overhaul of how the business managed its lead scoring rules, and re-evaluate how marketing should be measured more appropriately in the future. 

Whether B2B or B2C, the marketing KPI is ultimately at fault (not the marketer just trying to achieve their numbers). Let’s dive into real-world B2C examples of how marketing KPIs can be misleading, and how to track the ones that truly matter. 

When Hitting a KPI Doesn’t Mean Success 

A good marketing KPI should align with business objectives like revenue growth, customer retention and efficient resource allocation, but in practice, they’re often optimized in ways that serve marketing teams more than the business. Here are common scenarios where KPI success is actually a red flag:

1. Retargeting Conversions: The Illusion of Efficiency

The KPI: Achieve a high number of conversions from retargeting ads. 

How It’s Manipulated: A marketer can optimize this KPI by retargeting known VIP customers and people who are already repeat buyers. Since these customers were likely to purchase anyway, the retargeting ads drive up conversions without generating incremental revenue. The result? Marketing reports a great conversion rate, but the business just spent ad dollars on people who didn’t need persuading. 

What You Should Track Instead: Incremental lift from retargeting. Compare conversion rates of exposed vs. non-exposed audiences to determine if the ads are truly influencing purchases.

2. Impression Share in Search Ads: A Costly Vanity Metric 

The KPI: Impression share lost to bidding (Google Search Ads). 

How It’s Manipulated: To improve this KPI, marketers may simply increase bid amounts to win more impressions. This tactic raises CPCs, driving up costs without necessarily improving efficiency or conversions. 

What You Should Track Instead: Focus on impression share lost to budget instead. If budget constraints are the issue, reallocating spend toward better-performing campaigns (rather than increasing bids) is the smarter move.

3. Website Traffic: The ‘Big Number’ Trap

The KPI: Increase total website visits. 

How It’s Manipulated: Marketers can boost website traffic by running broad-reach display campaigns or using clickbait-style headlines in ads. The problem? High traffic doesn’t equal conversions. A flood of unqualified visitors can make a website appear successful while generating zero revenue. 

What You Should Track Instead: Conversion rate and revenue per visitor. Focus on how well traffic converts, rather than just how many people visit.

4. Email Open Rates: A False Signal of Engagement

The KPI: Increase email open rates. 

How It’s Manipulated: Marketers can tweak subject lines with aggressive tactics (e.g., “Your account is about to expire!”) to boost email opens. But if the content inside doesn’t drive action, what’s the point? 

What You Should Track Instead: Click-through rate (CTR) and revenue per email sent. High open rates without action are misleading so it’s better to track what happens after the open.

5. ROAS: The Misleading Profitability Metric

The KPI: Maintain a high Return on Ad Spend (ROAS). 

How It’s Manipulated: ROAS often looks great when ads are targeted at high-value existing customers. But if these customers would have bought anyway, marketing isn’t truly driving incremental revenue, it’s just shifting attribution. 

What You Should Track Instead: Incremental ROAS and marginal CPA. Instead of looking at total revenue from ads, measure how much additional revenue the campaign is driving beyond what would have happened organically. 

How to Choose KPIs That Actually Matter 

Not all KPIs are bad! Just the ones that encourage vanity or misallocated spend. When selecting marketing KPIs: 

1. Align KPIs with Business Objectives: Every marketing KPI should be tied to revenue, retention or efficiency, ensuring that it directly impacts growth. It’s harder to do, and requires the ability to link top-of-funnel metrics to downstream conversions, but ultimately ensures that KPIs don’t lead to misleading vanity metrics that don’t drive growth. 
   
2. Measure Incrementality: Use control groups to determine whether an action truly influenced a customer’s decision or if they would have converted anyway. This is a great way to prove/disprove that a specific KPI is the right one. 
3. Avoid Vanity Metrics: Impressions, clicks, and likes mean nothing unless they contribute to engagement, conversion, or revenue. While it’s still important to have good ‘reach’, these vanity metrics are too easy to achieve through tactics that are not benefitting revenue. 
4. Use Omnichannel Attribution: Ensure KPIs account for the full customer journey, not just last-click interactions. 
5. Monitor Budget Efficiency: Ensure every dollar spent is optimizing for the best possible return, not just driving up artificial success metrics. 
6. Look Beyond Regular Marketing Metrics: A good example of a KPI in the airline industry is ‘Passenger Load Factor’ (PLF). This is about ensuring that planes are filled to ensure that each flight is not running at cost, or even worse, at a loss. While this KPI could also be manipulated through attribution measurements, this is a great example of a KPI to give to marketing that would inspire them to align with business profitability. 

Marketing KPIs Shouldn’t Be an Optical Illusion 

Shift focus from manipulated metrics to meaningful KPIs, and your marketing team will ensure their efforts translate into true value and impact instead of reports that just look good in executive meetings. Remember that your goal with this is to set and achieve numbers that actually drive business growth.