Don’t Drown in Data: Identifying the Marketing Metrics that Actually Matter
If you’ve spent more than five minutes on LinkedIn, you know that the business world is stacked to the rafters with pithy quotes. (I’m looking at you, Gary Vee.) Some make for great motivational memes, while others are, you know, actual good advice. In this latter category you’ll find a favorite quote of mine by the father of management consulting himself:
“What gets measured, gets managed.” - Peter Drucker
This concept works especially well when applied to your personal life, in everything from counting calories to tracking your retirement account. But in the business world, choosing what to measure can sometimes be overwhelming - especially when it comes to measuring your marketing efforts.
Want to know the average time someone spends on your page? There’s a report for that.
Click rate - no, I mean, click through rate? Wait, which is which again?
More importantly, which should I care about?
Thumbstop ratio. Engagement rate. Follower count. Bounce rate. So many rates.
While most of these metrics are easy enough to understand on their face, it's not always easy to see the forest for the trees. Worse still, focusing on the wrong metrics (which, spoiler alert, are usually vanity metrics) can cause you to spend your precious time and money in all the wrong places.
In this article, I’ll break down not just which metrics are most important for the health of your business, but the specific actions to take to help drive them in the right direction.
The Two Metrics That Help You Scale
Camp out for a day in your average marketing agency, and odds are you’ll hear an absolute alphabet soup of 3-letter acronyms. Unfortunately, one you might hear less often than you should is LTV, or lifetime value.
LTV is simultaneously one of the most foundational to business success, and one of the least considered by your average marketer.
This is obviously a problem (especially if you’re running ads) because if you don’t know how much a client is worth to your business, you don’t know how much you can afford to spend to acquire them.
And if you don’t know how much you can afford to spend on acquisition, you’re flying blind when it comes to making decisions about ad spend, not to mention the (many) other costs of your marketing campaigns.
LTV and CAC: Two Sides of the Same Coin
Right, so let’s say you’ve done the math and you have a good handle on LTV. Now what?
Well, once you know how much every client is worth, the next logical step is to assess how much it costs to get those clients to sign on the dotted line. In short, you need to understand your customer acquisition cost, or CAC.
CAC can get very tricky, very fast. So to prevent getting sucked into a metrics black hole, your best bet is to use some basic, back-of-the-napkin math:
Total Sales & Marketing Spend ÷ New Customers Acquired = CAC
While customer acquisition cost is useful on its own, it's typically a good idea to go one step further and calculate your LTV to CAC ratio. This tells you how profitable your customer acquisition efforts are.
If your LTV is at least 3x your CAC, you’re in a solid position. If it’s closer to 1:1? You’re either overspending to acquire customers or not retaining them long enough to make the investment worthwhile.
This concept brings to mind yet another pithy quote (the actionable kind):
"He who can spend the most money to acquire a client wins.” - Dan Kennedy
This is a helpful reminder that It’s not always about cutting costs - it’s about knowing how much you can afford to spend while still making a profit. If your LTV is strong, you can outspend competitors, scale faster, and dominate your market.
Pro Tip: Maximizing LTV
If you want to increase LTV, here are three key areas you can focus on:
Retention – The easiest customer to sell to is the one who’s already bought. Loyalty programs, exclusive offers, and strong customer service keep them coming back.
Subscription & Repeat Purchase Incentives – Make it easy (and rewarding) for customers to buy again. Discounts for auto-renewals, re-order reminders, and value-packed memberships can drive recurring revenue.
AOV Optimization – Higher average order values = higher LTV. Upsells, cross-sells, and bundling all help customers spend more per purchase.
AOV: The Easy Button for Profit
Most marketers obsess over acquisition—but the real money is in maximizing the value of every sale. That’s where AOV (Average Order Value) comes in.
A higher AOV means you recoup ad spend faster, increase LTV without needing repeat purchases, and squeeze more out of every marketing dollar. Better still, you can increase AOV with just a few strategic tweaks.
For example, smart e-commerce brands know that bundling complementary products, offering free shipping at a threshold, and using one-click upsells at checkout are proven tactics to get customers to spend more.
Amazon’s “Frequently Bought Together” section is perhaps one of the most well-known AOV plays, and for good reason. According to SmartScout, this single tactic translates into 35% more sales.
Service businesses follow a similar playbook—tiered pricing structures, add-on services, and premium VIP packages make customers spend more upfront. SaaS companies often boost their AOV by offering annual billing discounts, securing higher contract values while simultaneously improving retention.
One last thing to note is that when AOV goes up, the job of media buyers gets much easier. With more breathing room, they can afford to do more testing, whether that’s in creative, audience targeting, or bid size.
Speaking of ad performance, let’s talk about every media buyer’s favorite metric: ROAS.
ROAS: The Misunderstood Metric
Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) gets a lot of love. And on the surface, it makes sense—if you’re spending money on ads, you want to see a direct return.
But the mistake many businesses make is treating ROAS as the ultimate success metric, instead of what it actually is: a diagnostic tool that only works when viewed in the right context.
Here’s a simple example:
If Campaign A has a 4x ROAS, and Campaign B has a 1.5x ROAS, which one is better?
Most people would pick Campaign A—but what if I told you Campaign B brought in high-LTV customers who will buy again and again, while Campaign A brought in one-and-done customers?
Suddenly, ROAS alone doesn’t tell the whole story.
How to Think About ROAS Like a Pro
1. Remember that not all campaigns should have the same ROAS target.
Awareness campaigns (cold traffic) tend to have lower ROAS because they introduce new audiences to your brand. Their goal is to fill the funnel, not close sales immediately.
Retargeting campaigns (warm traffic) should have a higher ROAS because they target people already familiar with your business and closer to converting.
2. Before turning off a campaign, check what happens next.
Many businesses kill a campaign too soon because it looks unprofitable on the front end—but if those customers go on to make repeat purchases, you could be pulling the plug on long-term revenue.
Stay Positive: Tips for Improving ROAS
Obviously, ROAS isn’t something you “improve” directly—it’s a result of how well your entire funnel is working. So if your ROAS isn’t where you want it to be, review (and ideally, improve) each of these areas in turn:
Ad Engagement & Targeting – Are you getting the right audience to stop scrolling and take action?
Landing Page Experience – If people are clicking but not converting, your messaging, design, or offer might not be compelling enough.
Average Order Value (AOV) – The higher your AOV, the better your ROAS looks—even with the same ad spend.
Customer Retention – If new customers stick around, your acquisition cost becomes less important (see the notes on LTV above).
Since many of these ROAS improvements depend on how good your conversion rate is at specific touchpoints in your campaign, let's take a minute to get a grip on how to make it better.
Conversion Rate: Multiplying Fractions Ad Infinitum
Conversion rate (often abbreviated CVR) is one of those topics that comes up constantly in marketing discussions. And in general, it’s pretty well understood by both marketing firms and clients alike.
That’s because it’s fairly easy to understand - out of the people who reach some touchpoint, it’s better to have more people take the desired action than less. Fewer. Whatever. 😆
Where some people lose the plot with conversion rate is that they sometimes can’t identify which conversion point needs to be improved.
Since this topic is already the subject of countless articles (not to mention a sizable chunk of the nearly $400 billion eLearning market), we’ll keep things high-level with a few guiding principles.
1. Check Against Industry Benchmarks
When you’re digging through your dashboard, be sure you’re always back-referencing industry benchmarks for common conversion rates. Unbounce is just one of many great resources for this, and is a great way to identify the weak point in your funnel.
2. Fix One Thing at a Time
Ideally, you have enough leeway in your advertising to frequently A/B test, follow best practices, etc. Regardless of your testing budget, you always want to start with the weakest link, collect and measure your data, then rinse and repeat.
3. Measure, Then Manage
In the end, the important thing is to not just track conversion rates - though you definitely should be doing that. You also need to reverse-engineer the results you want, from the buy button all the way up to the first awareness ad. By improving conversion rate across the entire funnel, you’ll be well on your way to scaling your business to the next level.
Email Marketing: Show Me the Money (Per Month)
Email marketing is a prime example of where some marketers get caught up in leading indicators, rather than actual results.
Of course if you don’t have a good open rate, no one sees the link you want them to click.
Obviously if your CTR is low (NOT click rate, don’t even get me started), you know you need to step up your game within the body of the email.
But here again, while these are areas you can (and should) improve, they mean basically nothing if the attributable revenue from your list is low.
In my personal experience, most of the time attributable sales are low because you're emailing your subscribers about things they aren't actually interested in.
By contrast, if you simply give the people what they want, you’ll get much better results than you would obsessing over the perfect subject line or the fanciest way to use personalization tokens.
Google Yourself (It’s Fine)
The best part about organic traffic is that it’s free. Well, technically. You do have to invest in pleasing the search engine overlords - a point made crystal clear by the global SEO market reaching over $68 billion USD in 2022.
But with tools like SEMRush giving you access to hundreds of data points, how do we identify the ones that actually matter? In my opinion, you want to keep a constant watch over two key metrics: SERP (search engine results page) ranking and goal completions in GA4.
In short, traffic and conversions. If the work you’re doing keeps those numbers moving in the right direction (up), you’re in good shape.
Rented Traffic: How to Play the Social Game
Out of all of the channels where the answer to how you measure success is “it depends”, social media performance is right near the top of the list.
Just as we discussed with conversion rates, the first thing to keep track of is where you land compared to industry benchmarks. If you’re selling insurance, don’t be disappointed if you’re not getting as much engagement as the latest viral trend.
Does that mean that if you’re in the B2B space you shouldn’t be on social media? Of course not. But what it does mean is that, depending on your business model, you should adjust your expectations - and your strategy - accordingly.
For D2C brands, influencers, and community-driven businesses, social media can be a high-converting sales channel where direct response ads, viral moments, and organic content lead straight to purchases.
For B2B and high-ticket services, social is often a long-term brand play - a way to stay top-of-mind, showcase expertise, and reinforce credibility, rather than a direct lead-generation tool.
I may be a broken record, but I’ll say it yet again in the context of social media: at the end of the day, the most important thing to do is to tie your efforts back to business results. If social media is moving the needle, keep doing it.
Bring it on Home: Measure What Matters, Ignore the Rest
If there’s one theme that runs through everything we’ve covered, it’s this: Not all metrics deserve your full attention.
In other words, marketing success isn’t about tracking every last data point - it’s about tracking the right things at the right time, then doing those things that move the needle. So the next time you’re scanning through a reporting dashboard, ask yourself:
If it doesn’t impact revenue (or more to the point, profit), is it really worth measuring?
If a number isn’t helping you make a decision, does it even matter?
If a campaign is “performing well” by surface-level metrics but isn’t driving actual growth, is it really working?
Vanity metrics can be a distraction, but when you know what to look for, marketing data becomes a decision-making tool instead of a laundry list of numbers to keep track of.
When it comes to making data-driven decisions, this is the approach we take here at Reusser. We don’t just track every last metric for our clients - we help them make sense of the information, turn it into actionable strategies, then do the work that gets tangible results.
So if you’re wondering if you might be focusing on the wrong metrics, we're happy to help you assess your situation and figure out how to turn your data into new growth for your business.
Reach out today to get started with a quick conversation, and we’ll help you get on your way to measuring (and acting on) what really matters.