As management demands accountability of expenditures incurred, quite often marketing measures everything that can be easily measured — from website page views to press release downloads to search engine rankings. However, important as these metrics may be, they lack an explicit connection to hard metrics like pipeline, revenue, and profit. The result is a focus on soft marketing KPIs instead of hard revenue growth, on short-term ROI over long-term marketing accountability. Paul Farris in the study, marketing metrics – the definitive guide to measuring Marketing performance, surveyed 194 senior management functionaries across industries to understand the most important and useful measures. Financial metrics were rated very high in usefulness compared to any true marketing metrics