When Marketing Metrics Help (& When They Hurt)

Modern marketers love numbers. You’ll catch them in the wild talking about CTR, ROAS, CPC, and a million other arcane acronyms loaded with meaning. But just because a number is easy to track doesn’t mean it’s telling you the full story.

Mark Twain supposedly said “there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” He attributed that phrase to British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli, but of course, trying to track down the true source of a statement made in the 19th century is about as futile as trying to understand Google Analytics 4.

A lot of metrics are helpful. A lot are misleading. And, honestly, the vast majority are both at the same time—depending on what you do with them.

In this post, I’m going talk about:

But I want to start with the obvious question first.

Numbers feel objective, even if they’re not.

In marketing, you have to have one foot in science and one foot in art. You have to understand both data and “vibes”—no easy task—and do so in a way that can tie your efforts to outcomes. And to that end, metrics give the illusion of control.

And, indeed, you need metrics if you want to succeed in this business. You need a way to show progress, justify your budget, and look credible in front of clients and executives (if you’re a marketing consultant) or partners and accountants (if you’re marketing your own company).

In meetings, numbers beat stories. They travel well. A screenshot of a dashboard can sell a plan better than a nuanced explanation ever could. And that’s even true for me—I have a tough time taking someone seriously if they can’t back up what they’re saying with cold math.

But that’s also why metrics are dangerous. They flatten complexity and invite overconfidence. They crunch the world into a PowerPoint and replace the territory with a map.

Most people don’t question what a number actually represents. And even if you are a skeptic, it’s just like old Charlie Munger said, “it’s very hard to tell the difference between a good money manager and someone who just has the patter down.”

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OK, so I’ve made my case that metrics aren’t perfect. But I want to make this less abstract, so I’m going to give you a list a common marketing metrics I use everyday…and that I also don’t blindly trust.

Every single metric below has real value. But they’re also easy to game, prone to misunderstanding, and can be abused—intentionally or not.

Click-through rate is useful when you want to understand if a headline or ad creative grabs attention. People don’t click for no reason, and being able to confirm that you’re getting clicks is a good sign that you’re on the right track.

But don’t let high CTR go to your head. If those clicks don’t convert, of if the traffic is low-quality, you’re not actually making anyone any money!

I cannot tell you how many times I’ve run an otherwise great looking Google AdWords campaign, saw a double-digit CTR, and found out that they were going to the wrong people…if not outright spammers.

ROAS is tremendously useful if you’re working with direct-response campaigns where attribution is clean and sales cycles are short. It can tell you how much you’re making for every dollar you spend.

But the moment your funnel gets complicated, such as with long sales cycles or multiple touchpoints, ROAS starts to lose coherence. At its worst, ROAS can direct you toward short-term wins at the expense of more impactful long-game investments.

This is excellent for A/B testing, and it’s also pretty good for validating offers too. You can use this to refine your landing pages, signup flows, or calls to action.

But it’s when you start to compare conversion rates across different traffic sources that the wheels fall off the bus. SEO, advertising, and cold email are all going to have different conversion rates. And even Meta and Google ads will show different conversion rates and costs per conversion. So unless you’ve got a way to tie conversion rate to what really matters—revenue and profit—it can misdirect your attention.

And even this assumes you have enough data to make a call. It’s often tempting to cut off a marketing initiative way too early because conversion rate is 0%. when the root problem is that your tests just haven’t had time to show results when they just don’t have an adequate sample size.

Cost metrics like cost per click, cost per lead, and cost per impression (CPM) are tempting because you get them faster than nearly anything else. But if you don’t tie them back to lead quality or long-term customer value, this can be dangerously incomplete.

Cheap leads often cost more in the long run. If you get a bunch of clicks, but they’re all from tire-kickers who will never close, CPC can tell that you’re brilliant while your wallet slowly hollows out.

Visibility is really satisfying because it’s, well, visible proof that your marketing messages are “out there” in a meaningful way. And if your goal is awareness and not necessarily sales, then by all means, optimize for this (within the confines of the campaign you’re running).

But that’s where it ends. If you try to use impression to prove return on investment, you’ll find that you just can’t do that. Being seen does not mean being remembered. And even being remembered doesn’t mean making money.

If you’re having trouble getting people to open your emails, then you definitely need to pay attention to open rate. It’s great for testing subject lines, spotting deliverability issues, and making sure your lead lists meet a minimum level of quality. And yet, opened emails are only that—opened. It doesn’t necessarily indicate interest.

And, of course, if you see a huge dip in opens, maybe that means you’re going to spam and you need to use an email testing service online to see if something technical is going on.

But once you start hitting 30% for cold emails or 40% for warm emails, it makes more sense to optimize the body copy of your emails and the quality of your offers and calls to action. Your attention should shift toward clicks and, ultimately, sales.

Attribution models can give you a directional sense of how people find and interact with your brand. And that makes them an excellent starting point, to be sure.

But if you take them as gospel, that’s a mistake. Buyer journeys can get messy, especially if you sell an expensive product or service. They might have heard about you in an ad, forgotten about it for six weeks, Googled you out of the blue, asked ChatGPT for advice, forgot about it for another couple of weeks, and then got remarketing on Facebook which they finally clicked and took action for.

Should Facebook get all the credit for that?

You can’t use attribution to make definitive calls. It’s a point-and-grunt metric.

Most metrics are abstractions. They show you a tiny shred of what you need to know. Because after all, you’re really trying to answer questions like:

And those are very difficult questions to answer. Then you have to couple that with a number of other issues like:

Rather than looking at a dashboard and just believing it, you have to act like a detective and ask a bunch of questions. Much like Columbo, you have to follow a chain of reasoning and make sure the data backs up what you think is going on.

The closer the metrics are to actual money, the more trustworthy they are. And this is because they measure what actually resulted in someone turning over their hard-earned cash because they like the product or the service you’re selling.

I still use CPC, CTR, and the rest of the alphabet soup metrics on a daily basis—don’t get me wrong! But they all have to help me understand one or more of the following:

Based on that, if I could only see a handful of numbers in a monthly marketing report, these are the ones I’d pick.

I am a big fan of revenue and profitability first. If you’re not making money, or at least on a viable, pressure-tested path to making money, the rest just doesn’t matter—full stop.

Then look at customer acquisition cost (CAC). That shows you how much it costs to bring in each new customer. When you couple that with customer lifetime value (LTV) for B2B or average order value (AOV) for B2C, you can understand how much each customer or client is worth to you and whether your marketing investments make sense.

I also like watching qualified leads—manually tagged as qualified, if need be—to make sure I’m not just tallying up spam form submissions and feeling good about myself.

Churn rate is another big one because it tells you how fast customers leave. Pair it with sales cycle and you’ll know how long it takes to win new business. Put those together, and you can forecast revenue and properly budget for marketing. And they really ought to be measured together, because high churn rates aren’t necessarily bad if your sales cycle is fast enough to cover them.

And, sure, these aren’t perfect metrics either. But they are grounded in real, verifiable customer behavior. They’re a lot harder to game and much more reliable for steering a business toward sustainable growth.

Metrics aren’t the truth. But you can use them to find truth.

Every different metric is like a lens, and like lenses, they can sharpen your vision just as easily as they can blur it.

You need metrics if you want to make good decisions. But you absolutely must pair them with solid reasoning as well, or else you may spend your days chasing false patterns or measuring the wrong thing altogether.

So the next time you’re tempted to cite a statistic or optimize for a number, stop and think for a moment. Ask yourself a few questions:

Numbers are enormously powerful. But then again, so is a chainsaw.

Use them wisely.

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