B2B marketing analytics 101: Benefits, challenges, and getting started

Imagine you’re flying an airplane in a heavy fog. 

You can’t see anything. But you can access flight instruments like GPS, radios, and computers, so you know exactly where you are and where you’re going, right? Even if you can’t see more than a few feet in front of you. 

Using analytics is the difference between using those flight instruments and deciding that, no thanks, you’d rather just fly blind and see what happens. 

If you’re going to fly the plane, you need to use the flight instruments to see and understand what’s happening. If you’re going to do marketing for a B2B (business to business) company, you need B2B marketing analytics for the same reason. 

In fact, according to McKinsey, “Companies that effectively use analytics in service of marketing and sales performance are 1.5 times more likely to achieve above-average growth rates than their peers.” That sounds like smooth flying to us. 

This blog post will cover the benefits and challenges of B2B marketing analytics, plus tips on which B2B marketing metric to track and how to get started with your own B2B marketing analytics.

Let’s take off. 

B2B marketing analytics is the practice of collecting and measuring marketing data to improve the performance of a B2B company’s marketing campaigns and website (or app). To understand B2B marketing analytics, you need to understand how B2B companies work. 

B2B companies sell to other companies, not individual consumers. Slack, Notion, and Salesforce all sell their products to other companies and use B2B marketing analytics. B2C (business to consumer) companies like Apple, McDonald’s, or Shein, which sell to consumers, do not.

B2B sales cycles are longer and more complex than B2C. There are more stakeholders involved, and the price tag for B2B products is usually much higher. Switching to a new CRM (customer relationship management platform) or HRIS (human resources information system) is more expensive than shopping for your average consumer item, and choosing the wrong B2B solution can have an impact on a company’s entire operations.

Because of this, B2B purchases go through several evaluations and layers of approvals before being finalized, especially at larger companies. As a result, B2B marketing and sales are more focused on relationships, which tend to be more personal and last longer than their B2C counterparts. B2B marketing, sales, and CS teams will work together to proactively address buyer objections at every stage of the customer journey. By contrast, B2C relationships tend to be more transactional.

All of these differences impact the way that B2B companies use marketing analytics. In fact, these difference impact the way B2B companies most any kind of analytics.

For starters, the metrics that matter most are different for B2B marketing analytics. 

A B2C company like Netflix focuses most of its efforts on acquiring new customers. Its product is (relatively) inexpensive, and it appeals to millions of subscribers (for reference, Netflix has 287.7 million subscribers worldwide as of Q3 2024, according to Evoca). Its potential user base is very large. To increase revenue—and fight against inevitable churn—Netflix needs to capture more subscribers. 

By contrast, most B2B companies have a smaller potential user base, and individual accounts are worth more. As teams grow and B2B companies expand their offering, they stand to make more from each account in plan upgrades and cross-sells. In B2B, a single churned customer represents more lost revenue and lost potential revenue. 

B2B business models tend to focus most on retention, expansion, and metrics like CLV (customer lifetime value). 

That doesn’t mean that customer acquisition isn’t important for B2B marketing or that B2B marketing analytics won’t track new customer acquisition—they absolutely should. But B2B marketing analytics will prioritize different metrics than B2C.

All B2B businesses have data—about their customers, about their marketing efforts, and about their product. B2B marketing analytics allows marketers to gather, analyze, and use that data to fuel better, more effective marketing that allows them to: 

Effective B2B marketing analytics helps all revenue teams perform better and removes obstacles to the sales process. 

B2B marketing analytics is crucial for any growing B2B business, but that doesn’t mean it’s always easy. 

As we mentioned earlier, B2B sales cycles and buyer journeys are often longer and more complex than their B2C counterparts. There are more stakeholders involved in every purchase decision, and more end users who will be impacted by the choice—and those users often have different use cases and priorities, all of which the tool needs to solve. Multi-touch attribution becomes even more important, and marketers need B2B marketing analytics to support that. 

Marketing data comes from lots of different sources, including different marketing tools, and B2B marketers need a central place to ingest all of that data and analyze it. Without the right integrations, they can be stuck with siloed data. Without clean, organized data, any analysis will be flawed. 

Siloes are a problem between teams, too. Sales calls and customer support tickets have valuable data that marketing can use to inform their strategy—and marketing can share what gets traction with other teams to inform their own moves. But in order for all of that to work, teams need to communicate and collaborate. 

Finally, B2B marketing analytics can be challenging for non-technical marketing teams, especially small teams with resource constraints. Setting up marketing analytics and using it to make data-informed decisions can feel intimidating when you’re doing it for the first time. But the right tools can make the process simple and intuitive. 

Implementing B2B marketing analytics can seem daunting at first. But with the right tools and processes, B2B marketing teams can get up and running with a few integrations, a couple of clicks—and of course, a bit of strategic planning before you get started.

Here are a few steps to follow when implementing B2B marketing analytics: 

As we mentioned earlier, marketing at B2B organizations functions differently from B2C marketing, and different metrics matter. 

With large deal sizes and a smaller pool of potential customers, B2B businesses don’t just need leads: They need high-quality leads and MQLs (marketing-qualified leads).

Retention and reducing churn is also a priority, so metrics like customer retention rate and churn rate should be top of the list, as well as customer lifetime value (CLV—how much a customer spends over the course of their engagement with your company). Metrics like monthly recurring revenue and annual recurring revenue (MRR and ARR) are particularly important to SaaS and subscription businesses.

With that said, you don’t want to cherry-pick your metrics, either. Create a B2B marketing analytics tracking schema, which will help you identify which metrics matter most to your business and see how they all tie together. 

It’s worth noting that there are some metrics that all businesses need to be tracking: Things like website traffic and conversion rates matter whether you’re selling to a consumer or a business. After that, every business will be different. The metrics you track and prioritize need to be informed by your overall objectives and strategy, in alignment with the rest of your company. 

Revenue teams need to work together to unify data across tools and processes. Make sure that your tech stack is communicating and that your data is clean, organized, and accessible from your data warehouse. 

Different teams will use data differently, but they should all be working with the same information. 

Funnels are a sequential series of events that lead a user to conversion. Funnel analysis allows you to analyze how conversions happen, spot problems and drop-offs, and ultimately optimize your conversion rates.

Once you have your key metrics to track, your funnel analysis set up, and your data visible and accessible in one place, you need a way to visualize that information and share it with the rest of your team and your company. To do this, build and share marketing analytics dashboards that have all of your key marketing data visible at a glance. 

You can explore an example Mixpanel Board here to understand what that looks like. 

Have you ever heard the saying “people buy from people”? 

That’s particularly true in B2B, where relationships can span several jobs and companies. B2B marketing analytics can help you create personalized, tailored experiences that leads and customers remember, and they can help support the relationships that users build with your product, your company, and your team.