“See, Lola, management is not interested in impressions or clicks, they just want to see the number of new app users we are adding each month. It’s the only number we care about”.
That’s what the Head of Mobile Apps for one of my clients told me last year. I had just been signed up to help the marketing team address major gaps in their digital acquisition and growth marketing strategy, and I was holding cross-functional stakeholder engagements as part of my initial audit.
His words confirmed what their Head of Digital Marketing had told me from the start – they just couldn’t seem to get anyone senior interested enough in top-of-funnel metrics that were the starting point of their conversion journey.
Read More: ‘Set It and Forget It’ Might Be the Worst Thing for Your Marketing
Presenting TOFU Metrics: It’s Not What, It’s How
This challenge is a crucial one faced by marketing teams in different markets and industries around the world. My experience, however, has been that most people don’t get shut down when they present top-of-funnel metrics because executives “don’t care about marketing.” They get shut down because of how the metrics are presented.
I’ve sat in enough rooms to know the pattern – a member of the marketing team puts up a slide with reach, impressions, engagement, maybe a nice green arrow pointing up… and you can immediately feel the entire energy and mood change.
Someone clears their throat; or someone asks about downloads; or someone else says, “This is interesting, but what’s the impact?”. And just like that, the conversation is over, before it even gets a chance to start.
Let’s talk about how to avoid that.
Start with their problem, not your metrics
The fastest way to lose the room is to lead with numbers they didn’t ask for. The Head of Mobile Apps was right in saying all management cares about is how many new users signed up on the apps. Executives don’t wake up wondering what happened to reach last week. They wake up worrying about growth slowing, CAC rising, or targets slipping.
So start there.
Instead of saying “Our reach increased by 38% month-on-month…”, try saying “We are seeing early signs that demand is softening in one of our key segments, and our reach is where it’s showing up first.”
With this slight change in wording and perspective, you immediately demonstrate that your TOFU metrics have a job. They are no longer decoration, they are evidence.
Never present TOFU metrics alone – always pair them
Top-of-funnel metrics should almost never stand on their own slide, because they hardly tell the right story to non-marketers. They tend to make sense in relationship to something else.
For example, try to make the following pairings:
- Reach next to qualified traffic
- Engagement next to mid-funnel movement
- Awareness next to assisted conversions
When you do this, you are showing a system and just a scoreboard. This simple pairing changes the conversation from “Why should I care?” to “What’s driving that?”.
Translate metrics into plain business language
One mistake I see often is assuming everyone in the room speaks “marketing”, when they actually don’t. So, rather than saying “CTR dropped by 0.6%”,consider saying “Fewer people who see us are curious enough to click, which usually shows up as lower conversions a few weeks later.”
Don’t say “Frequency is declining”, instead you may want to say “We’re showing up less often to the same audience, which makes us easier to forget.”
This isn’t dumbing things down. It’s doing the work of interpretation, which is literally your job as a marketer.
Frame TOFU metrics as early indicators, not performance claims
One line that I find works surprising well is saying “This isn’t the result yet, it’s the signal before the result.”
That one sentence immediately resets expectations, and makes it clear that you are not claiming success, rather, you are showing foresight. Executives understand early warning systems, what they don’t like is being sold optimism without evidence that anything will actually change
Be explicit about what decisions the metrics inform
If your slide doesn’t answer “So what do we do?”, it most likely will get ignored. Every TOFU discussion should clearly point to one of three things:
- Scale (this is working, we should do more)
- Fix (something’s breaking upstream)
- Hold (don’t overreact yet)
When leaders see that TOFU metrics help them make better decisions, resistance drops fast.
Final Note: Credibility Matters Before Dashboards
Yes, you read that right.
From my experience, the people who get away with talking about TOFU metrics are usually the ones who have proven they understand the whole funnel. Once leaders trust that you care about outcomes and the bottomline as much as they do, they stop dismissing upstream signals as fluff.
So don’t defend TOFU metrics emotionally, instead, tie them to hard business outcomes and demonstrate that you understand that any conversation that ends at TOFU is bound to get dismissed.
From fintechs to ecommerce, startups to enterprises, I have helped companies drive more growth and get more value from their marketing budgets. If you would like to explore what that might look like for your company, do reach out to me for a discussion.