What’s the Deal with Marketing Reports That Have more then 5 Metrics? (asking for a friend)
Last week, I watched something that made me travel back in our marketin time-machine. It was really uncomfortable and honestly, it felt really bad. Since I use to do this with clients too (see Forgive me – us section below)
I sat in on a Zoom call between a business owner (friend of mine, we agreed years ago not to mix biz and friendship) and her marketing agency representative, getting walked through a 39-slide presentation of their “comprehensive performance dashboard.“
Seriously, who decided we needed to track “brand sentiment velocity“? Raise your hand if you would consider asking for a refund (my vote: 🙋♀️).
We are talking about a $3-4M , family operated successful roofing company here, not Johnson & Johnson™️
The agency rep clicked through slide after slide of colourful charts showing metrics like “cross-platform engagement synchronization” and “content resonance scores.“
My friend was patient (and more importantly, polite)… way more then i ever could be.
Want to know how many numbers actually mattered? Three. You can dig deeper after that , but three gives you a great feel for what the others are.
It’s like going to a restaurant and getting a menu with 28 pages… (you know the one, laminated and all). — “Just tell me what’s good here!”
But instead, marketing agencies hand you a novel-length report that reads like someone threw an AI thesaurus at a spreadsheet, asked it to “go nuts” and called it “strategic insights.”
Sadly, most marketing reports aren’t designed to help you make better decisions. They’re designed to make agencies look smart and justify their monthly retainer REGARDLESS of how its helping your business. The more complicated it sounds, the more valuable it must be, right?
Wrong.
(More on this below: See the full list of 30 useless metrics agencies love to track at the end – disclaimer: we actually did not make any of them up 🙈 …)
Why Most Marketing Reports Are Expensive Fairy Tales (or smoke and mirrors, take your pick)
About 4 years ago I realized we were part of the problem.
A client called me up, frustrated. “I’m getting reports that show my ‘brand awareness increased by 12%‘ and my ‘engagement quality index improved by 23%,'” he said. “But my phone isn’t ringing any more than it was last month. What am I missing?”
Nothing. He wasn’t missing anything. We were missing the mark.
The Problem with Metric Show and Tell
Agencies throw tons of metrics at you because it looks impressive.
It’s not.
It’s annoying.
It wastes your time (and money since they charge you for producing them).
It’s the marketing equivalent of that brother in law we all know who uses big words to sound smart but actually says nothing.
Unless brand awareness pays your mortgage, I’m not sure why we’re celebrating.
Pretty charts with impressive-sounding names that tell you everything except what you actually need to know: Is this making me money? Is this helping me recruit better staff? Am I getting large/bigger margin project leads/conversions? … (go ahead, keep the list going, im sure you have better ones then that)
Forgive me – us …
I used to be part of this nonsense.
5-6 years ago, we created.
No, we crafted reports that looked like they belonged in a NASA mission briefing.
Metrics galore, color-coded charts, trend analysis that went back before your business was still an idea.
I realized we were simply hiding bad results, lack of knowledge, behind pretty charts while clients revenue dropped.. but we were still “delivering” right?
Every metric in our report showed “improvement.” Our engagement was up! Our reach was expanding! Our content resonance score was through the roof!
That’s when it dawned on me that 90% of marketing metrics are just elaborate ways to avoid talking about the numbers that actually matter. Why admit that your ads aren’t working when you can point to “increased brand affinity measurement scores”?
Why look bad when you can look good and increase your retainer?
Well, you should look bad if you are doing bad.It enables both you and your client to ADJUST rapidly, stop wasting time, resources and money, and get to the meeting/exceeding business objectives quicker part.
And that’s where you SHOULD look good.
Why “Engagement” and “Impressions” Are Just Participation Medals
Let’s talk about engagement for a second. You know what has high engagement? Car accidents. Doesn’t mean you want to be in one.
I’ve seen businesses get excited because their Instagram post got 2000 likes and 87 comments.
Great.
Did any of those people buy something? Because likes don’t pay your rent.
Same thing with impressions. “We got you 50,000 impressions this month!” Fantastic.
How many of those impressions turned into customers?
Because my landlord doesn’t accept impressions as payment, does yours? (actually it does for Meta and Google since its directly tied to their revenu but that’s another story)
These metrics are the participation trophies of marketing.
Everyone gets to feel good about something, but no clients hardly ever wins.
The Complete List of Useless Marketing Metrics (hint: we don’t track any of them)
Before we get to what actually matters, big round of applause 👏 to the creativity of marketing mathematics.
Here are 30 marketing report metrics that are more confusing than trying to cancel a gym membership:
- Brand Sentiment Velocity – How fast people’s feelings about your brand are changing (as if emotions have speedometers)
- Share of Voice Momentum – Your brand’s conversation momentum compared to competitors (whatever that means)
- Engagement Quality Index – A made-up score that supposedly measures how “good” your engagement is
- Social Media Reach Amplification – How much your reach has been amplified (as opposed to just… increased?)
- Content Virality Coefficient – Mathematical formula for viral content (spoiler: there isn’t one)
- Influence Score Dynamics – How your influence score changes over time (influence according to who?)
- Brand Mention Sentiment Analysis – Computer analysis of whether people said nice things about you
- Social Listening Buzz Factor – How much “buzz” your brand generates (measured in… buzzes?)
- Community Growth Rate Acceleration – How fast your community growth is speeding up
- Content Resonance Score – How much your content “resonates” (measured by mysterious algorithms)
- User Generated Content Ratio – Percentage of content created by users vs. you
- Social Media Share Velocity – How fast people share your content
- Hashtag Performance Index – Which hashtags perform best (performance defined how exactly?)
- Audience Overlap Analysis – How much your audiences overlap across platforms
- Cross-Platform Engagement Synchronization – How synchronized your engagement is (whatever that means)
- Brand Affinity Measurement – How much people supposedly like your brand
- Social Media Sentiment Trending – Whether sentiment is trending up or down
- Influence Cascade Metrics – How influence flows through your network
- Content Engagement Velocity – How fast people engage with your content
- Social Proof Amplification Rate – How much social proof amplifies your message
- Community Engagement Depth Score – How “deep” your community engagement goes
- Brand Advocacy Measurement – How much people advocate for your brand
- Social Media Conversation Share – Your share of social media conversations
- Content Discovery Pathway Analysis – How people find your content
- Audience Persona Alignment Score – How well your audience matches your personas
- Social Media Authority Index – Your authority score on social media
- Content Lifecycle Performance – How content performs throughout its lifecycle
- Engagement Rate Optimization Score – How optimized your engagement rate is
- Social Media Influence Distribution – How your influence is distributed
- Brand Conversation Ownership Percentage – What percentage of brand conversations you own
Got more? drop us a line, we’d love 🥰 to add to this list… ✉️ support@smbcoach.ca
I’ve seen every single one of these in actual marketing reports (confession: we even had a few of those back in the day).
And here’s what they all have in common: None of them tell you whether you’re making money, recruiting better people, etc… (you know the list of objectives i’m going for right?)
Now, 3 Numbers That Actually Pay Your Bills
Enough nonsense. Here are the only three metrics that actually matter for your business:
1. Cost Per Lead – “What Did This Customer Actually Cost Me?”
This is it. This is a MUST marketing number. Everything else is just noise.
🧮 Your cost per lead is simple:
- Take your total marketing spend
- Divide by number of new leads you got
- $1,000 spent + 20 leads = $50 cost per lead.
Why this matters: The average small business puts 5-10% of revenue toward digital marketing, but most have no clue what each lead actually costs them.
They’re flying blind with their most important business expense.
Your ad platform literally tells you this. Google Ads shows you cost per conversion. Facebook shows you cost per lead. Your website analytics can track form submissions and phone calls. Why are we making it complicated?
What Good Looks Like:
- Local residential service (think plumber): $30-80 per lead
- Professional service (think lawyer): $200-500 per lead
- Restaurant: $5-15 per lead
- You? Let’s talk 😉
↗️ If your cost per lead is way above these ranges, you’ve got a problem.
↘️ If it’s way below, you might not be spending enough (or your tracking is broken).
Red flags to watch for:
- Your cost per lead keeps going up month after month
- You don’t actually know what your cost per lead is
- Your agency talks about everything except cost per lead
- Your cost per lead is higher than your average profit per customer
2. Conversion Rate – “Do People Actually __INSERT HERE__ (Buy My Stuff? Fill out my recruitement form? Sign up to my newlsetter? …)”
“We got 10,000 visitors!” Great. How many did something?
This is where most businesses discover the brutal truth about their marketing. You can drive all the traffic in the world, but if people aren’t doing the thing you want/need them to do, you’re just paying for expensive window shoppers.
📊 The Reality Check 97-99% people just… leave 🚪:
- Average ecommerce conversion rates: 1.4% to 2.5%
- That means out of every 100 visitors, only 1-3 actually buy something
🏆 Industry Winners & Losers – difference between industries is massive:
- Food & beverage: 6.11% conversion rate 🍕
- Luxury goods: Only 0.9% conversion rate 💎
📱If your website sucks on mobile = throwing money away 💸:
- Desktop users: 2.8% conversion rate
- Mobile users: Much lower rates
- BUT… Guess which traffic you’re probably getting more of? Mobile
🎯 Where Do You Stand?
- Below 1%: Something is seriously broken 🚨
- 1-2%: You’re average (not great, not terrible)
- 2-3%: You’re doing well ✅
- Above 3%: You’re in the top tier 🏆
💡 The difference between 2% and 4% conversion rate = double your revenue with the same marketing spend. That’s the difference between ramen and steak dinners.
3. Return on Ad Spend (acronym alert: ROAS) – “Did I Make More Than I Spent?”
This is the ultimate reality check. For every dollar you spend on advertising, how much revenue do you generate?
So Return on ads spend is simple:
- Take your total revenue from ads
- Divide by your total ad spend
- $3,000 revenue ÷ $1,000 ad spend = 3:1 ROAS
- That means you made $3 for every $1 you spent 💰
📊 The Reality Check:
- Good ROAS: 2:1 to 4:1 range
- Below 2:1 = You might be losing money 📉
- Above 4:1 = You’re probably leaving money on the table 📈
🎯 Industry Benchmarks:
- Google Ads average: 2:1 ROAS
- Facebook ads average: 2.98:1 ROAS
- Ecommerce average: 2.87:1 ROAS
- Strong benchmark: 4:1 ROAS
💡 The Big Miss:ROAS isn’t profit – it’s revenue. Your 3:1 ROAS might only be $0.50 actual profit after costs.
🚀 The Magic Multiplier: Improve ROAS from 3:1 to 4:1 = 33% more revenue with same ad spend. This beats chasing more traffic every time.
The Marketing Metrics That Sound Smart But Are Basically Useless
Now that you know what actually matters, let’s talk about the metrics that sound important but pay zero bills:
📱 Social Media Followers
The Reality: 55% of consumers learn about new brands through social media ≠ they buy from social media.
Discovery ≠ Purchase (most businesses confuse these two)
The Truth Bomb: I know businesses with 500,000 Instagram followers that make less money than businesses with 500 email subscribers. 💸
📧 Email Open Rates
The Question: “But 23.7% of people opened our email!”
The Follow-Up: Did they buy anything? 🤷♂️
What Actually Matters:
- Click-through rates ✅
- Conversion rates from email ✅
- Results: 15% open rate + $1,000 sales > 35% open rate + $100 sales
Note: This is why we prefer simple short text emails over fancy newsletters (though newsletters work for some clients – trial and error here…)
⏰ Time on Site
The Celebration: “Our time on site went from 2 to 4 minutes!”
The Reality: Great, they’re thinking really really hard about… not buying from you. 🤔
What High Time on Site Actually Means:
- People are confused 😕
- Can’t find what they’re looking for 🔍
- Checkout process is broken 🛒
- Context matters more than numbers
6 Other Numbers Worth Tracking (When They Apply To You)
Okay, so beyond the big 3, there are a few other metrics that actually provide useful information for some business types, given the data can be connected together correctly:
💰 Average Order Value (AOV)
Getting people to spend $10 more beats finding 100 new customers. Think upsells on ecommerce stores.
Your average order is $50. You get people to spend $60 instead. Boom – you just increased revenue by 20% without acquiring a single new customer. That’s the power of AOV optimization.
The challenge? This is harder to track for many small businesses unless you have a good ecommerce platform or CRM system. But if you can track it, focus on it.
📧 Email List Growth Rate
Only one-third of business owners regularly check their blog analytics. Even fewer track their email growth properly.
Your email list is the closest thing to owning your audience. An audience is way more cost-effective to reach than cold outreach. Social media platforms can change their algorithms or shut down. Google can change how search works. But your email list – those previous or potentially aware clients – are yours to engage with.
Track how many new email subscribers you get each month and where they come from. This is a leading indicator of future sales.
🔄 Repeat Customer Rate
Really hard to track without decent systems, but really powerful.
It costs 5-25 times more to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing one. But most small businesses have no idea what percentage of their customers come back for a second purchase.
If you can track this (big if for most SMBs), it’s gold. A business with a 30% repeat customer rate will always beat a business with a 10% repeat customer rate. Even if the second business has better customer acquisition.
Cost Per Click (When Your Ads Cost More Than Your Profit Margin)
This is where most businesses discover they’re paying $5 for clicks that generate $2 in profit 🤬.
Cost per click matters because it directly impacts your cost per lead and ROAS. If your average profit per customer is $100 and you’re paying $10 per click with a 1% conversion rate, you’re paying $1,000 to acquire a $100 customer. That’s not sustainable.
🔄 Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)
This metric separates businesses that survive from businesses that thrive.
Customer Lifetime Value is how much money a customer will spend with your business over their entire relationship with you. Someone buys from you once a year for 5 years at $100 per purchase. Their LTV is $500.
Here’s why this matters more than most businesses realize. It costs 5-25 times more to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing one. But here’s the kicker – most small businesses have no idea what their customers are actually worth over time.
This changes everything about how much you can afford to spend on customer acquisition. If you know a customer is worth $500 over their lifetime, you can afford to spend $100 to acquire them.
The challenge? This is probably the hardest metric to track for most small businesses. You need decent customer data, purchase history, and time to see patterns. But if you can track it, it’s pure gold.
Quick and dirty LTV calculation: Take your average order value, multiply by average purchase frequency per year, multiply by average customer lifespan in years. Not perfect, but better than guessing.
📊 Conversion Rate by Traffic Source
Direct traffic converts at 3.5% on average while other sources vary dramatically.
Not all traffic is created equal. People who type your website URL directly into their browser are much more likely to buy than people who clicked on a Facebook ad. People who find you through Google search convert differently than people who find you through Instagram.
Track this so you know where to spend more of your marketing budget.
How to Track This Without Getting a Business Degree
Here’s the part where I’m supposed to recommend some expensive software or complicated dashboard system. Instead, I’m going to tell you the truth: One spreadsheet. That’s it. One.
Create a simple spreadsheet with these columns:
- Month
- Total Marketing Spend
- Number of Leads Generated
- Cost Per Lead
- Website Visitors
- Conversions (sales, phone calls, whatever matters to you)
- Conversion Rate
- Revenue from Marketing
- ROAS
Update it monthly. Not daily, not weekly. Monthly.
I could have provided a download link, but let’s face it: most FREE download material is “sub par” isn’t it ? AND…if i provide a link, you’ll stop reading and not get the rest of this masterclass is marketing stats…we both loose.
🥷Monthly check-ins, not daily obsessing. Look at trends over time, not day-to-day fluctuations. Marketing is like the stock market – if you check it every day, you’ll drive yourself crazy with meaningless short-term variations (…judge me if you must: i tried options trading once… terrible idea).
When to Panic vs. When to Just… Adjust
🚨 Panic if:
- Your cost per lead keeps going up for 3+ months straight
- Your conversion rate drops by more than 50%
- Your ROAS drops below 1.8:1 for 2+ months
- You have no idea what any of these numbers are 🤷♂️
🛠️ Just adjust if:
- Numbers fluctuate month to month (normal)
- One bad month after several good months (happens)
- Seasonal changes that make sense for your business 🍂
- You’re testing new marketing channels (expect some volatility)
The Bottom Line: Why Simple Math Beats Fancy Reports Every Time
I know businesses doing millions in revenue that track exactly these three metrics. Nothing more, nothing less.
Why? They figured out that success comes down to simple math. If you know what it costs to get a customer, what percentage of visitors become customers, and how much revenue each marketing dollar generates, you can make intelligent decisions about where to spend your marketing budget. 🎯
Everything else is just noise.
If your agency needs more than 3-5 numbers to give you the real picture, they’re hunting for good stats in a sea of data to keep their retainer. Out of 30-50 numbers, you can always find a few to make anyone look good. The agency, not you. 🎭
The challenge isn’t finding more metrics to track. The challenge is having the discipline to ignore all the shiny objects and focus on what actually moves your business forward.
Most marketing agencies want you to think marketing is complicated because complicated justifies their monthly retainer.
The truth is, marketing is simple. Not easy, but simple. 💡
Challenge: Track these three numbers for 90 days and ignore everything else. I guarantee you’ll make better marketing decisions than 90% of businesses drowning in fancy reports.
Here’s what will probably happen. You’ll discover most of your marketing spend goes to channels that don’t actually generate customers. You’ll realize small improvements in conversion rate have massive impacts on revenue. You’ll start asking better questions about where to invest your marketing budget.
And maybe, just maybe, you’ll stop getting excited about engagement rates and start getting excited about bank deposits. 💰
Need Help to Actually Move Those Numbers?
Let’s have a real conversation about what’s actually possible with your budget and situation. No sales pitch. No templated presentation. Noooo slide deck about “comprehensive performance dashboards.”, let’s face it we have software that reports that for both of us….
Just honest talk about what makes sense for your business, which of these metrics you should focus on first, and how to set up simple tracking that actually helps you make better decisions.
Book 30 minutes with our team – we’ll spend the time figuring out what’s realistic for your business.
No pressure, no hard sell, just straight talk about what works.
Because at the end of the day (ooooohhhh big corporate expression here no?), marketing should make your phone ring and your bank account grow. Everything else is just expensive entertainment.
