Engagement is loud. Intent is silent.
- Isla Alison
- 1 hour ago
- 4 min read
Isla Alison, Strategist
Table of Contents
Something has been happening gradually across the B2B marketing space for a while now, and we are not talking about it enough:
We've become incredibly good at measuring activity, but much worse at recognising buying intent.
Open rates are up.
Clicks are coming through.
Webinars are filling up.
Reports look healthy.
Dashboards look great.
Yet sales teams still question lead quality. Attribution still feels murky. And marketers increasingly rely on "influenced pipeline" to explain performance.
And honestly, I understand why.
Across almost every programme I've worked on, attribution confusion shows up surprisingly early. Usually because of some combination of:
Inflated engagement signals
Poor contact qualification
Long, non-linear buying journeys
Disconnected lifecycle stages
Engagement metrics that don't always reflect actual buying behaviour
The problem isn’t that engagement metrics are useless. It’s that somewhere along the way, we started treating activity as intent.
And those aren’t the same thing.
Before we talk about how to improve that (which I touched on in my previous article about reactivation), I think it's worth asking a bigger question first:
Are we actually measuring buying intent properly anymore?
Why High Engagement Doesn't Always Mean High Intent
The problem with surface-level engagement is that it rarely tells the full story.
Opens, clicks, webinar registrations, and content downloads can all indicate interest. But without context, they don’t necessarily indicate buying intent.
Email marketing is probably one of the clearest examples of this. Opens and clicks can be triggered by security scanning tools. Content downloads are often exploratory rather than commercial. Webinar attendance may reflect curiosity rather than active evaluation.
The metrics themselves still have value, but the problem is how heavily they're often weighted within reporting, attribution and lead scoring models.
I've seen countless reporting dashboards where engagement is loud and intent becomes almost silent.
That doesn't mean engagement metrics have become meaningless. A view rate can tell you whether a subject line generated curiosity, and a click can tell you whether a call-to-action resonated.
Developers rarely move through buying journeys in a straight line. They'll spend weeks, sometimes months, researching independently, comparing documentation, exploring integrations and quietly validating solutions before they're ever ready to speak to sales.
As a result, some of the highest-intent buyers can appear almost invisible, while some of the most engaged contacts never become customers. The challenge isn't that we have too little engagement data. It's that we're often looking at the wrong signals.
Context matters far more than volume.
A single pricing page visit from someone on the buying committee can often tell you more than fifteen ebook downloads, multiple email opens and a webinar registration from someone with little influence over the buying decision.
Looking at those activities individually, the latter appears far more engaged. Looking at them in context, the former is much closer to buying.
That's the difference between measuring engagement and measuring intent.
Why Traditional Lead Scoring Falls Short
In theory, it makes perfect sense. If we can assign value to different behaviours, we should be able to identify who's ready to buy.
Many lead scoring models simply reinforce the same issue.
Ever opened an email out of curiosity? Clicked a link just to see what it was?
Downloaded a piece of content because the title looked interesting, only to forget about it a few hours later?
Most of us have.
Yet many scoring models still reward those actions as though they represent meaningful buying intent. The result is inflated lead scores, premature MQLs and, eventually, sales teams losing confidence in marketing-generated leads.
Intent rarely comes from a single interaction. It emerges through patterns.
A visit to a product page combined with a related asset download, followed by a return visit a week later, tells a very different story to a single email click. Layer in activity from multiple stakeholders within the same account, and the picture becomes even stronger.
Who is engaging matters just as much as how they're engaging.
The behaviour of someone on the buying committee shouldn't be weighted in the same way as someone casually researching a topic. Likewise, a developer repeatedly returning to technical documentation or integration pages may be showing stronger intent than someone who downloads every top-of-funnel guide you publish.
Which raises a more important question than whether your MQL threshold is set at the right number.
Are you adjusting your scoring model based on behavioural patterns, buying stage and feedback from sales?
Because if the answer is no, you're probably not measuring buying intent.
You're measuring activity.
So What Should We Measure Instead?
The answer isn't to stop measuring engagement. It's to stop measuring it in isolation.
Rather than treating every interaction as an individual signal, start looking for connected behaviours that show progression through a buying journey.
That could mean someone returning to your documentation after downloading a technical guide. It could be repeated visits to pricing or product pages. It might be multiple stakeholders from the same account researching the same solution over a short period of time.
None of those activities are particularly meaningful on their own.
Together, they tell a very different story.
The same applies to lead scoring. Instead of rewarding isolated actions, scoring models should reflect behavioural patterns, buying stage and the context surrounding each interaction. A pricing page visit from someone in the buying committee shouldn't carry the same weight as an email open from someone downloading a guide out of curiosity.
The organizations that succeed won't necessarily be the ones collecting the most data.
They'll be the ones who are best at understanding it.
Want to work through how Catchy can help you to get past engagement metrics and understand the signals coming from your customers? Talk to a Catchy strategist →