The Metrics We Ditched and What Actually Drives Growth Now

Editor’s Note: 
This article is part of a Digital Summit Collective series where we’re turning standout live sessions from recent Digital Summit events into actionable, on-demand insights for our community. Each piece is adapted from a real stage presentation—capturing the ideas, examples, and strategic thinking that resonated most with attendees.

The numbers that shaped marketing for the past decade are giving way to new measures of success that better reflect how customers discover, engage with, and buy from brands.

Every marketing team has a dashboard. Over time, those dashboards become more than reporting tools. They shape how organizations define success, influence where budgets are invested, and determine which strategies earn continued support.

The challenge is that customer behavior evolves much faster than reporting habits.

During a panel discussion at Digital Summit Denver, moderator Quinn Tempest challenged three marketing leaders to answer a deceptively simple question: What metric have you stopped caring about, and what has replaced it? Nikki Mosier of the National Academy of Sports Medicine, Karen Talavera of Synchronicity Marketing, and Ashley Nelson of Estée Lauder each approached the conversation from a different discipline, yet all arrived at the same conclusion. The metrics that mattered most yesterday are not always the ones that will drive growth tomorrow.

Measure what reflects customer behavior

The discussion began with a simple observation. Metrics should evolve alongside the customers they are designed to measure.

For Mosier, that realization came as AI began changing the way people search. Her team watched organic rankings improve while traffic and sales remained relatively flat. Instead of asking where their brand ranked, they began focusing on where it appeared inside AI-generated answers, comparison prompts, and large language models. Those signals painted a much clearer picture of visibility because they reflected how customers were actually discovering the brand.

Talavera described a similar shift in email marketing. Open rates once served as a reliable measure of engagement, but privacy updates and automated image loading have made that metric increasingly difficult to trust. Clicks, conversions, and subscriber lifetime value now offer a stronger indication of intent because they measure actions people consciously choose to take rather than technical events happening behind the scenes.

Although search and email have evolved in different ways, both examples reinforce the same lesson. The strongest metrics measure human behavior, not platform mechanics.

Efficiency alone won't sustain growth

Ashley Nelson challenged another familiar KPI by encouraging marketers to rethink how they use return on ad spend.

ROAS remains a valuable benchmark, particularly for lower-funnel campaigns, but it tells only part of the story. Organizations naturally invest more heavily in channels producing the highest returns, yet those campaigns often reach customers who are already close to making a purchase. Over time, that approach can limit future growth because fewer resources are dedicated to attracting new audiences.

Pairing efficiency metrics with customer lifetime value and new customer acquisition creates a more balanced view of performance. Instead of measuring how effectively marketing converts existing demand, marketers can also understand how successfully they are creating future demand.

Better metrics lead to better decisions

Perhaps the most important takeaway from the conversation had very little to do with analytics.

Changing a dashboard is relatively easy. Changing the way an organization defines success requires education, collaboration, and a willingness to challenge long-held assumptions. Marketing leaders increasingly find themselves explaining why familiar metrics deserve new context and why emerging indicators better reflect today's customer journey.

As AI reshapes search, privacy continues to evolve, and buying journeys become more complex, marketers have an opportunity to redefine what success looks like by connecting their reporting more closely to business outcomes rather than channel-specific performance.

What to do right now

1. Review the KPIs your team reports each month and ask whether they still reflect customer behavior or simply measure platform activity.
2. Introduce one forward-looking metric, such as AI visibility, customer lifetime value, or new customer acquisition, alongside your existing dashboard.
3. Connect marketing performance to business outcomes, including revenue, growth, and customer retention, to create stronger conversations with leadership.
4. Evaluate performance across the entire customer journey rather than optimizing individual channels in isolation.

The bottom line

Every generation of marketers inherits a new set of tools, technologies, and customer behaviors. The metrics that define success will continue to evolve alongside them.

The organizations that adapt most successfully will not be the ones with the largest dashboards or the most reports. They will be the ones willing to ask whether the numbers they rely on still reflect how customers discover, evaluate, and choose their brands today. That shift in perspective may prove to be the most valuable metric of all.

Watch the Full Session

This article was adapted from the live session The Metrics We Ditched—and What Actually Drives Growth Now presented by panelists Niki Mosier, National Academy of Sports Medicine (NASM), Ashley Nelson, Estee Lauder, Karen Talavera, Synchronicity Marketing™, and Quinn Tempest, Create Your Purpose LLC at Digital Summit Denver 2026

Watch the full video:

https://resource.digitalsummit.com/resources/material/the-metrics-we-ditched-den26/