5 Marketing Metrics That Actually Matter (And 5 That Don’t)

Sep 3, 2025

The Mirage of Metrics

Most business owners are looking at the wrong damn scoreboard.

They’re obsessed with likes, followers, and impressions. They brag about email open rates or “website traffic going up.” But here’s the truth: vanity metrics are business crack. They give you a quick high and leave you broke the next day.

If you want to scale, you need to track the numbers that actually move the needle… the ones tied to money, momentum, and market share. Everything else is noise.

The 5 Metrics That Don’t Matter (and Why They Trap You)

Likes
Likes measure thumb-taps, not bank deposits. All they prove is that someone didn’t hate your content.
Insight: Businesses die chasing “viral.” They win chasing visibility plus trust.
Followers
A big following with no engagement = dead weight. I’d take 1,000 buyers over 100,000 lurkers any day.
Insight: Build a community that comments, shares, and converts — not an audience that scrolls past.
Page Views
10,000 random visitors mean nothing if zero of them are in your market.
Insight: Traffic only matters if it’s qualified and moving down your funnel. Otherwise, you’re paying rent on a crowded room of strangers.
Email Opens
Apple’s privacy updates inflated open rates. You’re celebrating fake data.
Insight: Replies, clicks, and actual conversations are the real gold.
Impressions
Your ad hit 50,000 screens. So what? If nobody clicked, it’s just background noise.
Insight: Impressions feed ego, not pipeline.

“You don’t scale by counting fans. You scale by counting clients.”

The 5 Metrics That Actually Matter

1. Cost Per Lead (CPL)

What it means: How much you pay to generate one lead from a specific channel.
Why people screw it up: They brag about “cheap leads” without asking if those leads are any good. A $2 lead that never converts is more expensive than a $50 lead that books.
Hidden insight: CPL isn’t about cheap — it’s about efficiency. The metric only matters when paired with conversion rates.
How to use it: Track CPL by channel. If Facebook CPL is $30 and Google is $100, but Google converts 4x better, keep feeding Google. Don’t just ask “what’s cheapest?” — ask “what’s smartest?”

2. Lead-to-Appointment Conversion Rate

What it means: The % of leads that actually book a call, appointment, or consultation.
Why people screw it up: They generate leads, then blame “bad leads” when nobody books. Truth? It’s not the leads. It’s the follow-up.
Hidden insight: Most businesses don’t have a lead problem, they have a speed-to-lead problem. If you’re not contacting leads within 3 minutes, your conversion rate tanks.
How to use it: Track how many leads are booking in real time. If it’s low, fix your follow-up cadence before complaining about marketing.

3. Pipeline Velocity

What it means: How fast deals move through your funnel into revenue. Formula: (# of opportunities × win rate × deal size) ÷ sales cycle length.
Why people screw it up: They celebrate a bloated pipeline that looks good on paper but if nothing moves, it’s fake growth.
Hidden insight: Slow velocity exposes bottlenecks: unclear offers, weak follow-up, or drawn-out sales cycles.
How to use it: Audit where prospects stall. Are they ghosting after call #1? Dying at the proposal stage? Fix the choke point and you’ll see cash flow accelerate.

4. Client Lifetime Value (LTV)

What it means: The total revenue a client brings over the entire relationship (including repeat purchases, upsells, and referrals).
Why people screw it up: They only calculate the first transaction. That $2,500 deal? In reality, it’s worth $10K–$20K when you add retention and referrals.
Hidden insight: Knowing LTV makes marketing a math equation. If one client is worth $10K, you can confidently spend $1,500+ to acquire them. That’s how you scale; you buy growth.
How to use it: Audit your past 12 months. Add up initial purchase + repeats + referrals. That’s your true LTV. Then reverse engineer how much you can afford to spend on acquisition.

5. Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)

What it means: The ultimate scoreboard: for every $1 you put into ads, how many dollars come out?
Why people screw it up: They stare at ad dashboards without tying results to closed deals. Facebook says you got 200 leads (that's cool and all)… How many became paying clients?
Hidden insight: ROAS forces accountability. It kills the ego game of “we got a ton of leads” and replaces it with: “Did those leads put money in the bank?”
How to use it: Track ROAS monthly. Compare channels. If YouTube brings $4 for every $1 but Facebook brings $2, double down on YouTube while still nurturing Facebook for awareness.

The Dangerous Seduction of the Wrong Metrics

Chasing likes, impressions, and followers keeps you busy. You feel productive. But at the end of the month, your pipeline is empty.

Scattered tactics collapse. Systems compound.

If your scoreboard isn’t tied to sales, trust, and pipeline growth, you’re not running a business. You’re playing influencer.

“Do you want to be popular… or do you want to be paid?”

Building a Scoreboard That Wins

Here’s how to flip the script:

Pick 3 money metrics (CPL, conversion, LTV) and track them weekly.
Tie them to your funnel — Awareness, Authority, Action.
Review like a coach. Don’t obsess over numbers. Ask what they’re telling you to fix.

We build dashboards and KPI scorecards inside our Flagship program for this exact reason. Because once you see the right numbers, you can’t unsee them.