The Marketing Metrics I Actually Care About (And the Ones I Ignore)
Let me tell you about a meeting I sat in early in my career where a marketing leader proudly showed a slide of follower growth, impressions, and email open rates — and then looked genuinely confused when the CEO asked, "But what did it do for the business?"
That moment stuck with me. Because the answer, if we were being honest, was: we had no idea.
After 15 years in marketing and many years now working as a Fractional CMO, I've developed very strong opinions about which numbers actually matter. I'm going to share them here — including the ones I've stopped paying attention to, and why.
The Metrics I Actually Care About
1. Revenue Attributed to Marketing
This is the one that matters most. Not leads. Not clicks. Revenue.
I want to know — directly and with as much clarity as the data allows — how much of what came in the door can be connected to marketing activity. This requires proper attribution setup and some nuance (more on that below), but it's the number that ties everything we do back to business impact.
If your marketing can't draw a line — even a dotted one — to revenue, something is broken.
2. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
How much does it cost to acquire one customer? And is that number going up, going down, or holding steady?
CAC is useful on its own but becomes powerful in context. If your CAC is $80 but your average order value is $40, you have a serious problem. If your CAC is $200 but your customer lifetime value is $2,000, you have a machine worth scaling.
I track CAC by channel, not just in aggregate. Knowing your blended CAC is fine. Knowing that Facebook is acquiring customers at $60 while Google is at $180 — that's actionable.
3. Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)
How much is a customer worth to your business over the full course of the relationship?
LTV changes how you think about almost every marketing decision. It tells you how much you can afford to spend acquiring a customer. It tells you which customer segments are most valuable. And it tells you whether your retention efforts are actually working.
LTV is also one of the first numbers I look at when I start with a new client. It tells me a lot about the health of the business, not just the marketing.
4. LTV:CAC Ratio
Put the two above together and you get one of my favourite diagnostics. A healthy ecommerce business is typically looking at an LTV:CAC ratio of 3:1 or better. If you're below that, either your acquisition costs are too high, your retention is weak, or both.
This ratio is also a useful guardrail when you're deciding whether to scale a channel. Don't pour more into a channel until the unit economics make sense.
5. Conversion Rate (at each stage of the funnel)
I'm less interested in your overall conversion rate than I am in conversion rates at each stage. Where exactly are people dropping off?
Traffic to lead. Lead to opportunity. Opportunity to sale. Each transition is a lever. When I see a business with decent traffic but terrible lead conversion, the problem is usually the landing page or the offer. When I see a strong lead rate but weak close rate, it's often a sales and marketing misalignment issue.
Conversion rates by stage tell you where to focus your energy.
6. Retention Rate and Churn
Especially for subscription businesses or brands that rely on repeat purchase, retention is everything. Acquiring a new customer costs five to seven times more than keeping an existing one. That's not a platitude — it's a math problem.
I track monthly retention, I track churn cohorts, and I look closely at where in the customer lifecycle people are falling off. Is it after the first purchase? After the second? Is there a seasonal pattern?
Retention work is often the highest ROI marketing you can do. It's also, in my experience, the most neglected.
7. Email Performance (the right kind)
Yes, I track email metrics — but not the ones you might expect. Open rates are increasingly unreliable thanks to privacy protections. What I care about is click-through rate, revenue per email sent, and unsubscribe rate trends.
Revenue per email is particularly telling. It's the number that tells you whether your email program is a real business driver or just something you send because you feel like you should.
The Metrics I've Stopped Caring About
Follower Count
I said what I said. Follower count is a measure of size, not health. I've seen brands with massive followings generate almost no business from social, and lean accounts with 3,000 highly engaged followers that sell out product drops in hours.
What matters is what your audience does, not how many of them there are.
Impressions
Impressions tell you how many times something was technically visible. They tell you almost nothing about whether anyone cared or took action. I use impressions to understand reach in a general sense, but I never report on them as a meaningful metric.
Vanity Engagement
Likes. Shares. Comments that say "🔥🔥." These feel good and mean very little. I want to see click-throughs, saves, DMs, replies that start actual conversations. Engagement that signals intent is worth tracking. Engagement that signals someone paused for half a second is not.
Website Traffic (in isolation)
Traffic is a means to an end, not the end. I've worked with businesses that were obsessed with growing traffic while ignoring the fact that their conversion rate was 0.4%. Tripling traffic with a broken funnel just means three times as many people leave without buying.
Traffic is important context, but it needs to be read alongside conversion data to mean anything.
A Note on Attribution
Here's the honest truth about marketing attribution in 2026: it's imperfect, and anyone who tells you otherwise is either naive or selling something.
Multi-touch attribution is complicated. Last-click gives too much credit to the bottom of the funnel. First-touch ignores everything that came after. iOS privacy changes have made paid social data messier than it used to be.
What I do instead of chasing perfect attribution is triangulate. I look at the data from multiple sources — platform reporting, GA4, post-purchase surveys asking customers how they found us — and I build a directional picture. It's not exact. But it's honest and it's useful.
The Real Question
Every time someone shows me a metric, I ask: so what?
What decision does this number help me make? What would we do differently if it went up or down? If you can't answer that, the metric might not be worth tracking.
The goal isn't a beautiful dashboard. The goal is a business that grows. Keep your eye on the numbers that connect those two things.
