The Marketing Metrics That Actually Matter - And 6 That Are Wasting Your Time

Open any marketing report and you'll be drowning in numbers within seconds. Impressions. Reach. Engagement rate. Click-through rate. Bounce rate. Sessions. Time on page. Follower growth. Share of voice. And buried somewhere near the bottom, if you're lucky — actual conversions, actual leads, actual revenue.

The marketing industry has a metrics problem. Not a shortage of data — an abundance of it. And in that abundance, the numbers that actually connect to business outcomes get lost in a sea of metrics that are interesting but ultimately useless for decision-making.

The 6 Vanity Metrics to Stop Reporting

• Impressions: How many times your content was theoretically displayed. Tells you almost nothing about whether anyone actually saw it, engaged with it, or took any action as a result.
• Follower count: A lagging indicator at best, a vanity metric at worst. An account with 2,000 engaged followers outperforms one with 200,000 disengaged ones every time.
• Page views: Without context — where they came from, what they did next, whether they converted — raw page views are noise.
• Bounce rate: This metric is so often misinterpreted it's almost dangerous. A high bounce rate on a contact page where someone found your phone number and called you is a success. Context is everything.
• Social media reach: Reach measures potential exposure, not actual impact. A piece of content that reached 10,000 people but prompted zero action is worse than one that reached 500 and generated 50 enquiries.
• Email open rate: Since Apple's Mail Privacy Protection, open rates are largely fabricated data. Shift your email metrics focus entirely to clicks and conversions.

The Metrics That Actually Drive Decisions

Cost Per Acquisition (CPA): How much does it cost you to acquire a customer or lead through each channel? This is the metric that tells you where to invest more and where to cut. Track it religiously across every channel, every campaign, every ad set.

Return on Ad Spend (ROAS): For every dollar you spend on advertising, how many dollars in revenue do you generate? ROAS should be tracked at the campaign level, the channel level, and the product/service level. Anything below your minimum acceptable ROAS gets optimised or killed.

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): This is the number that changes how you think about acquisition cost. If a customer is worth $8,000 over their lifetime, a $400 acquisition cost is a bargain. Without understanding CLV, you'll underspend on acquisition and leave enormous growth on the table.

Conversion Rate by Traffic Source: Not all traffic converts equally. Knowing that your Google Ads traffic converts at 4.2% while your Facebook traffic converts at 1.1% tells you something important about where to allocate budget — and whether your landing page experience differs meaningfully by channel.

Revenue Attribution by Channel: What percentage of your revenue is driven by each marketing channel? And — critically — what would happen to that revenue if you removed a channel? This is the question that proper multi-touch attribution helps you answer.