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Use these marketing KPIs to assess the success of your B2B marketing efforts and see where your marketing and sales teams can make improvements.
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Tracking the right B2B marketing KPIs can show teams where their spend is working, where their marketing funnel requires revision, and how marketing efforts contribute to wider business goals.
A 2025 LinkedIn survey found that nearly half of B2B marketers across the globe must justify their marketing spend to C-suite executives every month. Accurately tracking your business’s metrics can help you keep colleagues and senior leadership informed and aligned with your marketing efforts.
Read on for a brief explainer of what B2B marketing KPIs are, why they are important to track, and a list of essential KPIs to measure.
Business-to-business (B2B) marketing key performance indicators (KPIs) are specific metrics used to measure the success of a business’s B2B marketing strategy and determine whether to make changes to aid future performance. KPIs are tied to high-level business goals and stack performance against objectives, giving marketing teams a consistent way to track impact over time.
For example, Morgan Cros, founder of Original Duckhead, tracks several marketing KPIs to measure the health and conversion success of the brand’s B2B pipeline. Setting goals for metrics such as reorder rate and sell-through rate has changed how the founder understands demand for the brand, helping her identify products that fit her B2B clients’ preferences.
“I think a lot of what I used to do was based on intuition, and now it’s more data-driven,” Morgan says on an episode of the Shopify Masters podcast.
Although B2B and business-to-consumer (B2C) businesses track similar core metrics, KPIs can differ due to sector priorities and buyer tendencies.
B2B purchases often involve longer sales cycles, multiple decision-makers, and complex account onboarding processes. Think year-long contracts that require budget approval and ongoing relationships. As a result, B2B KPIs place a greater emphasis on metrics around relationship building, nurturing, and management to show a lead’s return on investment (ROI) over time.
B2C purchases often occur quickly through individual decisions. B2C KPIs emphasize metrics linked to individual purchasing behavior, such as website traffic, click-through rate, and cart abandonment.
Use these B2B marketing KPIs to guide your strategic planning:
Formula: Marketing campaign cost / Number of leads generated
Cost per lead illustrates how much a business spends to generate a new lead and can assess the efficiency of a lead generation campaign. Company goals might include reducing the cost of generating qualified leads or improving the efficiency of marketing campaigns.
Formula: (Number of converted leads / Total number of leads) x 100
This rate tracks how many of your leads become purchasing customers. Reviewing your lead-to-customer conversion rate can help you improve the efficiency of your sales funnel or evaluate your company’s conversion strategies. Businesses can compare rates across channels, campaigns, or audience segments to identify where leads drop out and adjust their marketing efforts accordingly.
Formula: (SQLs / MQLs) x 100
A marketing qualified lead (MQL) is a potential customer who has engaged with a company’s marketing efforts. This might include someone who has downloaded a product guide, clicked on an advertisement, or signed up to attend a webinar. A marketing team must qualify a lead before linking them with a company sales team or representative, which can improve conversion odds, preventing lost time and effort. Performing these or other actions indicates to a marketing team that a lead is ready for sales outreach.
Sales-qualified leads (SQL) are customers who have demonstrated interest in purchasing a company’s products or services. They have typically already progressed through the marketing funnel, engaged with sales teams, and demonstrated purchase intent.
Knowing what percentage of marketing qualified leads that turned into sales qualified leads helps marketing and sales teams assess whether they agree on what a high-quality lead looks like, which can ultimately ensure both teams’ activities are aligned. This measurement can be relevant for businesses looking to improve low sales numbers post-marketing touchpoints.
Formula: Total sales and marketing costs / Number of acquired customers
Sometimes referred to as cost per conversion, this measures the cost of acquiring a new customer. Comparing CAC across channels can help you determine where your marketing budget is generating customers most efficiently. You can use this to improve the cost efficiency of customer acquisition or reduce the cost of marketing campaigns.
The apparel supplier Ninja Transfers uses CAC tracking to decide how to allocate marketing budgets. Head of Sales Josh Hannum discusses integrating analytics software Triple Whale into Shopify to identify channels where CAC is lower, helping optimize marketing spend.
“A ton of our revenue is tied to Triple Whale showing us where the lower CAC is and moving our budget there,” he says in a case study.
Formula: [(Customers at end of period − new customers acquired during period) / Customers at start of period] x 100
Customer retention rate measures the percentage of customers a business retains over time. This is particularly relevant to B2B retailers that rely on ongoing relationships or are built around ongoing accounts.
Examples include:
Subscription-based services or products
Software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies whose clients pay subscription fees
Logistics and fulfillment providers who manage recurring B2B orders
This KPI can show whether customers see enough value to continue purchasing from a business after their initial order.
Tracking this KPI can be useful for companies looking to increase repeat business and strengthen customer relationships, revealing successes to evaluate and emulate across accounts.
Formula: Average customer value x Average customer lifespan
This predicts the total revenue a customer relationship generates over the end-to-end duration of their relationship with a business. Comparing customer lifetime value with customer acquisition can show businesses whether those costs are justified. It also shows whether marketing teams are securing the right type of customers and identifying high-value existing ones for further exploration.
Regarding Ninja Transfers’ approach to tracking CLV, Josh Hannum says LTV is worth tracking.
“Investing in the best-performing channels keeps our dollars focused on bringing in new customers, and those customers’ LTV [lifetime value] is what helps drive our revenue up year over year,” he says.
Formula: (Active users/ Total accounts) x 100
This metric shows what percentage of a company’s customers are using their product. It’s an indication of whether your product is meeting customer needs and is likely to be repurchased or subscribed to. This is particularly relevant for SaaS and subscription-based businesses.
Formula: (Customers who placed a repeat order / Total customers) x 100
Reorder rate measures how many customers place another order after their initial purchase. Many B2B retailers rely on recurring relationships or supplier-seller contracts. Reorder rate can inform such retailers about customer satisfaction and product-market fit.
Original Duckhead uses reorder rate to measure the health of their B2B pipeline. Morgan Cros shares that the brand maintains an 80% reorder rate with their wholesale clients, their primary metric for assessing product-market fit.
Formula: Total revenue / Number of orders
Average order value measures how much customers spend per order. This KPI is particularly relevant to businesses looking to increase revenue generated per transaction or identify higher-value customers on their books.
Muammar and Stephanie Reed, cofounders of MiJa Books, use this KPI to evaluate marketing spend for their brand. Tracking AOV from online retail purchases encouraged the brand to shift their target marketing demographic from individual online orders to higher-value B2B clients like school book fairs. This increased their AOV from ceilings of $30 to $6,000.
Formula: (Net return from marketing / Marketing budget) x 100
ROMI measures revenue generated in relation to marketing costs, which assesses marketing effectiveness. Businesses looking to improve marketing profitability can use this KPI to identify higher-performing marketing activities where budgets should be allocated in the future.
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Shopify B2B account holders can use Shopify Analytics to measure marketing performance and create customizable reports to show marketing activity performance. You can segment sales data, identify your highest-spending B2B clients, and create filtered reports to analyze performance from marketing channels. Use these tools and reports to your advantage:
Customer reports. Use Customer reports to segment new and returning customers and analyze cohorts to show customer activity over time. This data feeds marketing KPIs such as average order value, customer lifetime value, customer retention rate, and customer acquisition costs.
Shopify Analytics. Customize the Shopify Analytics dashboard with metric cards relevant to your specific marketing KPIs. The dashboard provides insights into store performance, highlighting trends across average order value, returning customer rate, visitors, and more, tracking progress against goals and outlining changes or trends.
Growth. Configure the Growth section of your Shopify interface to review and track the results of marketing campaigns and marketing performance over time.
Integrations. If you’re using external tools to track your sales funnel, integrate external applications into your storefront to build a more complete view of marketing performance.
KPIs in B2B sales are specific metrics used to measure performance that are tied to business goals. They are a consistent way to track marketing impact over time.
Common B2B marketing metrics include cost per lead (CPL), lead-to-customer conversion rate, customer acquisition cost (CAC), and reorder rate.
The four main types of B2B marketing are content marketing, digital marketing, content marketing, and relationship marketing.
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