The metrics your CEO actually cares about (and how to report them)

Most marketing reporting starts in the wrong place. It starts with what marketing did. Impressions up, click-through rate improved, organic traffic growing. All true. None of it answers the questions your CEO is actually asking.

Building on our experience as in-house CMOs and Marketing Directors, we wanted to share our learning from sitting at the exec team table and reporting upwards to the CEO and Board. Every point below is based on what we got right, or from learning the hard way about what doesn’t land.

Start with your business plan. Before you create a dashboard, ask what the business is trying to achieve this quarter / year. Revenue growth. More leads, or more customers. Higher average order value. Better cross-sell into the existing base. Lower churn. That is the brief marketing is actually working to, whether anyone has written it down that way or not.

Every metric in your report should trace back to one of those outcomes. If it doesn’t, it belongs in your team’s own dashboard, not the one you’re sharing upward.

Vanity metrics don’t lead to action. These ones do.

Clicks, reach, impressions, open rates, follower counts. They measure activity, not outcomes. They tell you what marketing did. In many respects they’re vanity metrics that tell a story of volume and behavior, not whether that activity actually drove commercial value. Keep them for your own team’s optimisation. Leave them out of anything going to your CEO and the wider exec team.

Present an email open rate improvement as a highlight and watch the CFO’s face tell you how irrelevant that number is. You won’t make the same mistake twice.

Replace your day-to day data points with metrics that flag a decision-point or action to do something different, not activity. A metric earns its place in the dashboard if the answer to “so what?” is obvious. 

The questions your CEO wants answers to and the metrics to track

These four questions hold regardless of the type of business you are, the B2B marketing metrics and the B2C metrics underneath them just differ.

1. Are we generating enough demand to hit plan?

2. Are we acquiring valuable customers efficiently?

3. Are we winning in the right places? 

4. Are we moving in the right direction?

Keep the metrics to the ones you can influence. Unless there’s a good reason, only include metrics that are answering these questions directly.

Match the cadence to the metric, not the other way round

Not everything above moves at the same speed, and reporting everything at the same cadence is a mistake. Now you’ve got the right list of metrics, the job is to work out which ones genuinely shift month to month and which only tell you anything worth acting on over a longer timeframe.

Pipeline value, cost per acquisition, conversion rate, these can move meaningfully within a month and are worth reviewing at that pace. Brand awareness, advocacy, market share, shift more slowly. Reporting them monthly isn’t meaningful and invites people to react to ‘noise’ rather than a real shift.

A single reporting cadence is the wrong model. Run something like:

• Weekly: the operational indicators your team needs to manage day-to-day activity
• Monthly: the action-orientated metrics above, the ones that actually move at that pace
• Quarterly: the slower-moving numbers, brand, advocacy, market share, where a monthly read would be noise, not signal

A simple dashboard of metrics, delivered on a meaningful cadence keeps focus on the right numbers and creates positive dialogue around taking the right actions.

What your marketing dashboard should actually look like

Make the dashboard easy to interpret. You don’t need lots of charts, but you do need to indicate clearly whether the numbers you’re showing are on track and improving, or need debate and action. Again, keep it simple. Ideally a single page, built like this:

When everyone’s looking at the same tight set of numbers, there’s room to properly discuss what’s behind them rather than getting lost hunting through detail. Have an action column so people can see what your planned next steps are. A number without a next step invites more questions, not fewer. 

People sitting round the exec team and board table bring real experience, so use the discipline of a simple report to make space for their challenge and insight, not to shut it down. 

Know what the numbers are telling you and what they’re not

Attribution is getting harder, not easier. Privacy changes, fragmented customer journeys and AI-driven search mean you often cannot trace a sale back to a single piece of marketing activity with certainty. That’s not a reason to fudge the numbers. It’s a reason to be explicit about what you’re confident in, what you’re inferring from wider evidence, and where the honest answer is “we believe this is contributing, here’s why, and here’s what we’re doing to test it.”

A report that claims total certainty on every line is usually less trustworthy than one that’s precise about its limits. Your CEO will trust the second one more, not less. We saw this play out with one client recently. We unpicked their sales reporting and found the numbers were being chosen to paint a rosier picture than reality. Greater clarity in the data bought back credibility.

When the numbers are bad

Don’t bury a miss in activity metrics. Name it, explain why, and set out what you’re doing about it. A leader who brings a clear, honest read on underperformance with a credible plan earns more confidence than one who delivers a polished report that avoids the real story. Your CEO will find out either way. Better it comes from you, with a plan attached.

You’ve walked into the meeting with a red number and there’s no way to soften it. From experience, the CEO’s reaction is generally never to the number itself, it’s whether you’ve got a grip on why, and what you’re doing about it. That’s the actual test, so be prepared, get to the root issue (if you can), own the narrative and have a clear path to move the dial back to green.

Simple metrics build a bigger story

Keeping your reporting high-level and simple isn’t a compromise. It’s what lets you tell a real story about how marketing is contributing to the commercial performance of the business. Own the parts that sit with you. Where they don’t, that’s not marketing hiding behind other functions, it’s being clear on what marketing actually influences and where the business needs to work together to close the gap. It’s about understanding what’s genuinely driving each number, what’s in your control and what isn’t.

That clarity is what creates momentum. Not a lucky run of good numbers, but visible proof that you know what’s working, what isn’t, and what you’re doing about both. That’s what actually sticks with your CEO.

Every partner at Open Velocity has sat in the CMO seat: knowing which metrics tell the right story to an exec team and board isn’t guesswork, it’s built from experience and from working across a wide range of clients facing the same problem. If you’re building this reporting structure for the first time, or inheriting one that isn’t working, that’s exactly the kind of thing we help marketing leaders work through in our Coaching & Mentoring programme.

We’re always happy to talk through client challenges, so we allocate time for our free Growth Clinic sessions every Friday – come with a question, leave with direction.