Marketing KPIs: How AI Is Reshaping the Tracking Landscape

CTR is losing ground, conversion rates are rising: The figures behind the trends

Previously vital KPIs in digital marketing are becoming less meaningful. At the same time, other figures are gaining in importance and new metrics are coming into focus. These developments are driven by changes in user behavior resulting from LLM-based systems like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini.

Conventional performance indicators such as click-through rates (CTRs) are losing relevance in the context of AI-powered search results and Google’s AI Overviews.

Several studies confirm this trend:

• Similarweb’s figures back up what we’ve all been seeing: Zero-click searches are the new normal. Data collected for 2025 reveals that over 80 percent of searches no longer involve a single click.

• Between mid-2024 and late 2025, organic click-through-rates for informational Google searches with AI Overviews fell by 61 percent. This change in behavior also affects paid traffic, as Seer Interactive found in a report from Q4 2025: Paid click-through-rates for the same queries plummeted by as much as 68 percent.

• However, as a study by Semrush from July 2025 shows, these trends are accompanied by rising conversion rates – visitors reaching websites via ChatGPT and similar tools are 4.4 times more valuable than those using organic search. That’s because they’re generally more highly qualified prospects, having visited the brand’s site at a different point in their customer journey.

• In September 2025, an analysis by WordStream spanning multiple sectors found that conversion rates increased in 65 percent of all industries compared with the previous year.

As the figures demonstrate, clicks and traffic are no longer the best ways to measure success. Instead, marketing KPIs that track visibility and share of voice provide a more accurate picture.

Revenue KPIs are gaining importance

CTR hasn’t been the primary measure of campaign success for some time. But which North Star Metrics should you be using to set objectives and evaluate performance instead?

• Future-ready reporting should focus more on revenue KPIs.

• The actual added value and measurable revenue contribution of a campaign are what matter, not just traffic or clicks.

• The bottom line: Visibility must be assessed in context – presence in AI-generated answers, qualitative reach and brand exposure are becoming increasingly relevant.

Factor in these points to evaluate performance at every stage of the funnel with greater granularity.

6 strategic learnings: Assessing performance in the AI era

Apply the following six learnings to consistently adapt your tracking and reporting methods to changing user behavior.

Don’t focus on the easiest things to measure. Instead, shift your attention to the data that really tells you something useful about the effectiveness and efficiency of your marketing activities.

#1 Prioritize data-driven attribution over last click

Say goodbye to marketing KPIs based solely on last-click analysis. Instead, use data-driven attribution (DDA), multi-touch attribution and marketing mix modeling (MMM). Combine these methods with geo-tests or holdout tests.

This approach will allow you to recognize which channels and touchpoints actually make a revenue contribution, rather than just which one happens to deliver the last click.

#2 Carry out intent-based analyses

Segment your traffic by:

• High intent vs. low intent

• Returning vs. first-time visitors

• Engaged vs. unengaged sessions

Analyze the conversion rate, revenue contribution and cost per acquisition for each segment to identify the target groups that are really driving your campaigns forward.

#3 Focus on quality and revenue KPIs

Stop evaluating campaigns primarily in terms of vanity metrics like CTR and click volume, and start using value-oriented marketing KPIs such as:

• Revenue contribution

• Customer lifetime value (CLV)

• Customer acquisition cost (CAC)

• ROAS or ROI

• Marketing efficiency ratio (MER)

• Pipeline contribution

Shifting to these metrics will allow you to steer your marketing consistently toward value creation rather than focusing on surface-level signals.

#4 Measure brand impact – even in AI environments

Supplement performance data with brand indicators such as:

• Branded search volume

• Direct traffic

• Brand lift

• Share of search

• Brand search lift

You should also track your brand’s visibility in Google’s AI Overviews and in generative responses from LLM-based systems.

Leveraging these marketing KPIs is essential to truly understand your actual brand exposure in both conventional and AI-powered search environments.

#5 Add journey and engagement KPIs to your mix

Don’t just measure conversions, measure qualitative journey indicators too:

• Engagement depth (scroll depth, dwell time on core pages, actions like demo clicks or pricing views)

• Journey velocity (e.g., time to opportunity)

• Retention and repeat visits

These digital marketing KPIs show how effectively your activities are developing users along the entire customer journey.

#6 Define new visibility metrics for AI search

Enhance conventional SEO indicators by adding new visibility KPIs like:

• AI visibility score or answer visibility (presence in AI Overviews, snippets, chat answers) and

• Unified visibility, which combines organic rankings, SERP features and AI answers.

Incorporating these visibility metrics will give you a realistic picture of your brand and content presence in a search landscape that’s increasingly shaped by generative AI.

Takeaway: Realign marketing KPIs to optimize your campaigns

Marketing is a data-driven discipline, so it’s all the more vital that you use valid criteria to assess the success and failure of your activities. In a search ecosystem dominated to a growing extent by AI, clicks and CTRs no longer provide the information you need. What matters is the actual value contribution to revenue, to the brand and to long-term customer relationships.

Now is the perfect time to look again at your digital marketing KPIs and rethink your approach to reporting.

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