If you’ve been reading marketing headlines lately, you could be forgiven for thinking we’re in a time warp.

• People are screaming, “SEO is dead!” just like they were back in 2010.
• Top-ranked websites are claiming “It’s all over!” just like back in 2010.
• Pundits are “wondering” if marketing is worth it, just like back in 2010.

The lyrics are different, but the melody is the same: Google has made some big changes. So have many of your customers. Nobody is quite sure how to cope with it all. The clock is ticking, and everyone is looking to you for solutions. As they say, everything old is new again. So what do you do about it this time?

First of all: step out of the time warp.

SEO isn’t dead. Neither is digital marketing, nor marketing as a whole.

It’s not “all over.”

And, as before, as always, marketing is still worth it. If you do it right.

The problem: the number of ways to do it wrong is increasing. Just look around. It’s likely that some of your key competitors are publishing 100% AI-generated content. The kind that can torpedo your search rankings and leave you less trusted by customers. And while that may seem like an easy pitfall to avoid, there are many others.

The one we’ll talk about today: measuring the wrong things.

Most savvy business leaders have heard the old saying,  “What gets measured gets managed.”

You’ve probably already got an analytics suite like Google Analytics collecting data from your website. But are you using the data in the right way to get the clear insights you need? As of right now, most businesses aren’t. That’s because they’re doing what used to work, but times have changed.

Consider this your tap on the shoulder.

It’s not 2010 anymore, but it’s not too late to get on track.

Now’s the time to lead. Here’s how you do it.

The Biggest Mistake Businesses Are Making With Their Data Isn’t About Collecting It

These days, companies that are serious about marketing are already collecting data.

What you need now is a new way to interpret it.

The old digital marketing lens focused on things like this:

• Impressions
• Hits
• Dwell time
• Bounce rate

These basic signals still matter, but on their own, they don’t give you a complete picture.

Savvy business leaders need to ensure their marketing teams are focusing on the right things. For digital marketing metrics in 2025, that could mean looking at B2B marketing KPIs that once flew under the radar. Designing a leadership-driven strategy that works means taking on a fresh perspective.

These metrics count for marketing ROI that Central Florida can take to the bank:

MEANINGFUL GROWTH METRIC 1: Lead Quality

It’s been said that a brand only needs 1,000 die-hard fans to prosper. The challenge: “fans” aren’t the same thing as “customers.” Lead quality is essential. If you’re not explicitly scoring your leads, now is the time to organize the data you need and get started. High-quality leads turn into lifelong customers.

Luckily, every visit to your website, social media, or other digital properties produces some of the data you need to assess lead quality. It simply needs to be assembled into a framework that helps you understand the “tipping point,” that is, when a lead’s quality is high enough that direct contact may lead to a sale.

Lead quality can be surmised in a few different ways:

• Match between a lead and your customer avatar.
• Interaction with your content, products, or brand.
• Interest signals like form fills and demo requests.

These complement BANT qualifications—Budget, Authority, Need, and Timeline—since they can be worked out in advance by a well-constructed marketing funnel before sales personnel ever get involved. Indeed, if quality is high enough, many truly motivated leads will be glad to answer BANT questions within your marketing pipeline.

Operationalizing lead quality as a KPI takes time (you will have to look at your conversions and work backward to understand the actions they took), but it’s worth it. Set up the right constellation of lead quality signals, and no one will ever spend time focused on a lead who was never going to convert in the first place.

MEANINGFUL GROWTH METRIC 2: Conversion Velocity

Faster than a speeding bullet. More powerful than a locomotive.

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s … your marketing funnel?

Conversion velocity is the speed with which a first-time visitor becomes a lead and a lead becomes a customer. The more complex and specialized your service offering is, the more likely it is that your conversion velocity will be impacted. Customers not only need to know, like, and trust you—they also need to understand what you do.

Service-based businesses in Central Florida often experience some “conversion lag” as prospects engage with content and educate themselves on what you offer, who you do it for, and why your way is best. While there’s bound to be some downtime, you can accelerate conversion velocity by smoothing the path to a sale.

That calls for a holistic look at what your customers need and what you offer.

That can include:

• Providing lead magnets that answer prospects’ questions and support them in their goals.
• Developing self-assessment tools that enable them to identify the top solution for their issue.
• Ensuring resources, like FAQs, are easy to digest through the use of targeted video content.
• Eliminating annoyances like broken links that can cause frustration and drive visitors away.
• Accelerating page load times and ensuring security for smooth and seamless transactions.

There’s much more to it, of course, and this only scratches the surface. Your marketing agency partner can help by illuminating the customer’s journey and uncovering ways to simplify it, streamline it, and make it compelling.

MEANINGFUL GROWTH METRIC 3: Client Lifetime Value (LTV)

A sale is a sale is a sale. Or is it?

While there’s nothing wrong with a single sale, sustainable growth is built on long-term relationships. You make a commitment to helping your customers improve their lives. When the depth of that commitment is shown to them again and again, it eventually influences long-term behavior in the form of a strong brand relationship.

The most basic formula for LTV goes like this:

Average Purchase Value x Purchase Frequency x Customer Lifespan

Needless to say, lead quality and conversion velocity both factor into this, especially the latter. Everyone in the digital marketing world knows it’s easier to sell to a current customer than it is to find a brand new one. What is often unsaid is this: find ways to improve velocity between purchases, and LTV rises accordingly.

Once you have a customer’s attention, elevating them to repeat-customer status is easier than it looks. Simply find new and better ways to resolve issues related to the original problem they came to you about. At the same time, seek ways to add new value so you can ethically justify premium pricing or even a subscription.

Whether your customer makes a lot of smaller purchases or one major one per year, you’ve achieved the objective of higher LTV. With enough data, you can refine further, creating separate pathways for budget-conscious and premium-minded customers that provide each one the maximum value per dollar.

New York Ave Delivers Performance Marketing Florida Businesses Trust

“When all is said and done, more is said than done.”

You’ve got the knowledge you need to succeed in digital marketing in 2025. Don’t let it stay theoretical. Instead, work with a digital marketing partner that helps you turn your analytics into tools for clarity, not just a monthly or quarterly report that goes nowhere.

Time and time again, Central Florida business leaders have told us: “We’ve invested in digital marketing before, but we didn’t know what we were measuring.” All too often, measurement turns into its own justification. With New York Ave, your strategy improves and so do your results, because we focus on signal, not noise.

Don’t waste another hour parsing an analytics report that seems to exist just to be an analytics report.

Contact us for real marketing-driven growth.