Stop Oversharing: The Marketing Data No One Cares About

Here’s a hard truth for every marketing team: most of the data you’re sharing is boring. Not just boring to your colleagues in sales, finance, and operations—boring to everyone, including most marketers.

And nothing embodies this better than the beloved, overused, utterly pointless web traffic chart. You know the one. A 52-week line graph showing slight seasonal bumps (thanks, Black Friday!) and the regular dip (summer holidays). It rarely moves in any meaningful way, yet somehow it ends up in every internal marketing report like it’s the crown jewel of insights.

So, why do marketing teams do this? Because it's easy to get and interesting to us. But there's a problem: it’s not relevant to anyone else.

Photo by Sander Sammy on Unsplash

The Three Buckets of Marketing Data That Actually Matter

Years ago, I worked with an marketing guru Meta Karagianni at SiriusDecisions, who had a brilliant way of categorizing marketing data into three simple buckets:

1. Readiness - Can we deliver?

2. Activity - What are we doing?

3. Outcomes - Did it work?

Most marketing teams live in the “Activity” bucket throughout their days and weeks. It’s comfortable there. But the real value comes from shifting the focus to Readiness and Outcomes. Let’s break this down.

1. Readiness: The Stuff Leadership Actually Cares About

This is all about whether your marketing team has what it needs to deliver the results your business needs:

• Budgets: Are we funded properly?

• People: Do we have the right skills and capacity?

• Tools & Agencies: Do we have the martech and partners to execute effectively?

This data isn’t flashy, but it’s crucial. It’s your ticket to resource conversations with the leadership team. Instead of saying, “We’re busy,” you say, “Here’s the gap between what we have and what we need to hit our goals.”

These conversations are essential at the start of the year for annual planning, but they need to continue year-round as teams shift, business needs evolve, and new tactics emerge.

2. Activity: The Comfort Zone (But Tread Lightly)

Activity data includes:

• MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads)

• Event attendees

• Content published

• Social media posts, follows, and likes

• CPM, CPC, CTR, ...

This is the stuff marketers love to track. But outside your team, it doesn’t matter unless it connects to outcomes. Sharing endless slides about webinar attendance or blog post views invites everyone to have an opinion on your tactics. Suddenly, Bobbie from Finance thinks he knows how to improve your PPC strategy. (Thanks, Bobbie.)

While activity reporting may not excite stakeholders outside marketing, it's invaluable within the team itself. This data fuels the daily and weekly back-and-forth between marketing specialists as they adjust and optimize campaigns and tactics. Tracking these leading indicators helps ensure that activities are aligned with business outcomes, enabling quick pivots and continuous improvement based on real-time performance insights.

3. Outcomes: The Metrics That Move the Needle

This is where the magic happens. Outcome data shows how marketing drives business goals:

• Revenue growth: How many deals did marketing influence?

• Customer engagement & retention: Are we improving loyalty and reducing churn?

• Brand visibility & sentiment: Is our reputation growing in key markets and with target audiences?

Outcome data ties your efforts to real business impact. It’s what the CEO cares about. It’s what the board wants to see. It’s the ultimate “so what?”

This data is important but not easy. It asks hard questions that need to be answered. What counts as "marketing influence"? How are we measuring customer engagement and loyalty? Are we investing effectively in brand measurement?

As a marketing leader, you live in business outcomes. They shape your QBRs, casual chats with business leaders, and readiness conversations. Marketing needs a unified voice, consistently sharing clear, outcome-focused messages across the business.

The Takeaway: Share Less, Show More (Of the Right Stuff)

Marketing teams need to break the habit of data dumping and start being data storytellers. Here’s how:

• Lead with outcomes. Start every report with what matters: the business impact.

• Support with readiness. Show where you need resources to keep delivering.

• Keep activities in the appendix. They’re interesting (to you), but they’re background noise for most people. So have them ready in case, but don't flood the zone with them.

So next time you’re tempted to drop a web traffic chart into your report, pause. Ask yourself: Does this support the story about our amazing impact? If not, maybe just leave it where it belongs—in the marketing team’s Slack channel with a shrug emoji.