There is a persistent problem in B2B marketing that rarely gets discussed openly: organisations invest significant time and budget into campaigns, only to find themselves unable to explain whether the results were actually good. Numbers go into reports. Charts get shared in team meetings. But the core question, “Is this performance above or below average for our industry?”, often goes unanswered.
The reason is simpler than most marketers would like to admit. Without a clear frame of reference, any number can be made to look like progress. A 3% email click-through rate might represent outstanding performance for one sector and a serious underperformance in another. Without context, data is just noise dressed up as insight.
This is where the discipline of benchmarking earns its place as one of the most practical tools available to modern marketing teams.
Understanding Digital Benchmarks: More Than Just Industry Averages
When marketers talk about digital benchmarks, they are referring to standardised performance metrics that allow teams to compare their results against what the wider market is actually achieving. These benchmarks cover everything from webinar attendance rates and email open rates to on-demand content engagement, conversion efficiency, and session duration across digital experiences.
The value of benchmarks is not simply in the comparison itself. It is in what that comparison enables. A team that knows their average webinar registration-to-attendance rate sits below the industry norm has a specific, actionable problem to solve. A team that does not know this benchmark exists will keep optimising the wrong variables, improving things that were already performing adequately while leaving real gaps unaddressed.
According to research from Amplitude, 54% of companies that rely heavily on marketing analytics report above-average profitability. The implication is direct: businesses that build their strategy around real performance data tend to outperform those that rely on intuition or historical internal comparisons alone.
The Engagement Data Shift That B2B Teams Cannot Afford to Ignore
One of the most significant developments in B2B marketing over the past few years has been the shift in what constitutes meaningful engagement. Page views and session counts, once the headline metrics in any digital marketing report, have given way to a far more nuanced picture.
Today, leading marketing teams are tracking interactions within experiences: poll responses, resource downloads, questions submitted during live content, CTA clicks, and content replays. Each of these signals tells a different story about where a prospect sits in the buying journey and what kind of follow-up they are likely to respond to.
This matters enormously for how benchmarks should be read. The 2026 Digital Engagement Benchmarks Report from ON24 reveals that B2B buyers are now more engaged than ever, but they are simultaneously demanding richer, more interactive content that speaks directly to their specific needs. The volume of engagement is growing, but so are the expectations that come with it.
What this means practically is that marketers can no longer treat all engagement as equivalent. A prospect who watches 40 minutes of a live webinar, responds to two polls, and downloads a follow-up resource has demonstrated a fundamentally different level of intent compared to someone who opened an email and briefly visited a landing page. Benchmarks that fail to distinguish between these two types of interaction are giving marketing teams a distorted view of their pipeline health.
Key Benchmarks Every Digital Marketing Team Should Be Tracking
For teams looking to build a more rigorous performance measurement framework, a handful of metrics tend to separate leading teams from those merely going through the motions.
Webinar and virtual event attendance rates. The gap between registered attendees and actual attendees is one of the most informative signals in digital marketing. Industry averages hover around 40 to 50% of registrations converting to live attendees, but this figure varies significantly by sector, day of the week, time zone alignment, and how well promotional communications are sequenced. Teams that benchmark this consistently will be far better placed to identify whether their promotional strategy is the bottleneck.
On-demand content consumption. As noted by ON24’s research, roughly 50% of total webinar viewership now occurs after the live event ends. This makes on-demand engagement a critical but frequently underweighted metric. The question for marketing teams is not just whether on-demand content is available, but whether it is producing measurable engagement activity, such as CTA clicks and content downloads, at rates comparable to live session performance.
Engagement actions per attendee. Rather than treating total attendance as the primary success measure, sophisticated marketing teams are beginning to calculate the average number of engagement interactions per attendee across a digital experience. This ratio offers a far cleaner signal of content quality and audience relevance than attendance figures alone.
Email performance in context. According to B2B benchmarking data compiled by The B2B Labs, average email open rates for B2B audiences in 2025 sit between 22 and 28%, while click-through rates range from 2.5 to 4.0%. Teams seeing CTRs below 2% should be examining subject line relevance, segmentation quality, and the alignment between email content and landing page experience, rather than simply sending more frequently.
Conversion rates from gated content. Landing pages for gated assets such as reports, webinars, and toolkits convert at between 5 and 10% on average. Pages that reduce form friction to three or five fields, incorporate social proof, and clearly articulate the value of the content routinely exceed 12%. Understanding where your own conversion rates sit relative to these figures tells you whether you have an audience problem or a page optimisation problem.
Why Benchmarks Without Context Are Still Misleading
It is worth applying a degree of critical thinking to how benchmarks are used. Industry-level averages flatten enormous variation. A benchmark for webinar engagement across all B2B sectors will necessarily mix high-engagement software buyers with lower-engagement procurement audiences, producing a number that accurately describes neither.
For benchmarks to be genuinely useful, they need to be applied with at least some attention to sector, company size, and the stage of the buying cycle being targeted. A campaign aimed at generating awareness at the top of the funnel should not be measured against the same conversion benchmarks as a campaign targeting decision-ready buyers at the bottom.
This is precisely why sourcing benchmarks from data that reflects your specific audience type matters as much as the benchmark figures themselves. Reports that aggregate performance data across thousands of real digital marketing interactions, segmented by industry and engagement format, will always produce more actionable intelligence than generalised surveys asking marketers what they believe their performance to be.
Building a Benchmark-Led Marketing Culture
The organisations that get the most value from benchmarking are those that treat it as an ongoing discipline rather than an annual exercise. They review performance against benchmarks quarterly, adjust their targets as industry norms evolve, and build shared definitions of what “good” looks like across the team.
This requires, first and foremost, the right data. It is not enough to rely on internal historical performance as the benchmark. Last year’s results are an internal reference point, not an external standard. The question worth asking is not whether your email click-through rate improved compared to last quarter. It is whether your click-through rate is competitive against what comparable organisations are achieving right now.
For teams that have not yet built this discipline, the starting point is usually straightforward: identify the three to five metrics that most directly connect your digital marketing activity to pipeline and revenue outcomes, find credible sector-specific benchmark data for each, and establish a regular review cadence that makes performance comparison part of standard reporting rather than an occasional audit.
Marketing that cannot explain its own performance relative to the broader market is, at best, difficult to improve and, at worst, impossible to defend to senior leadership. Benchmarks close that gap. They transform data into context, and context into decisions worth acting on.
The B2B marketers who are building market-beating programmes in 2026 are not those with the biggest budgets. They are the ones who understand, with precision, where they stand and what “better” actually looks like.
