It always comes back to the numbers. No matter how much we want to prioritize the humans, perfect our messaging, and create ethical psychology-driven marketing strategies, we can’t ignore cold, hard data because, after all, it’s the marketing metrics that tell us whether our human-centric efforts are working.
However, I’ve seen countless teams fight over data that is irrelevant to the decisions at hand. For example, buying a list of 9,000 contacts does not equate to acquiring 9,000 MQLs overnight.
If you want to steadily improve your marketing month over month and year over year to get more ROI with less effort, then you need to make sure you’re looking at the marketing metrics that actually hold meaning for the goals you’re trying to achieve and the decisions you’ll need to make.
Let’s dive into the four most important marketing metrics that you need to be paying attention to and, perhaps even more importantly, what they mean for the performance of your marketing funnels.
Visibility: Are Your Buyers Seeing You?
As you build out your marketing strategy — whether you’re doing so with our ELITE Method Toolkit or using another framework — you need to be tracking funnel stage-specific marketing metrics all along the way to make sure you’re identifying any weak points in your funnel.
You can then go in and reinforce those weak points with missing pieces or test different messaging and visuals to get the most effective marketing possible.
For example, when someone is in the brand awareness stage of the funnel, you want to find out if they can find you. This is where you would track visibility metrics such as:
- The number of keywords that you’re ranking for
- The number of keywords that you’re holding in positions 1–3
- Whether or not your content is being featured in AI-generated snippets (aka AI overviews, or AIOs)
- Whether you have images and video showing up in featured images
- How many impressions your content is getting on social media
If your visibility metrics are suffering, all of your other metrics will suffer down-funnel.
Engagement: Are Your Buyers Responding Positively to You?
The second group of important marketing metrics to track is your engagement metrics. You can measure interest in your ideas, brand, solution, and content based on figures such as:
- The number of followers your brand has on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram, depending on where you decided your target audience spends time
- The growth rate of your email list on your website and other tools and platforms
- On-content engagement activities such as reshares, comments, and likes
- Time spent with content as indicated by low bounce rate, high time on page, and high scroll percentages
To track how well your marketing is connecting emotionally, look for indicators of resonance. Tools like Hotjar, Fullstory, and AI-based copy-testing platforms (e.g., Wynter) can help you understand not just what people click, but what they feel.
Once you’ve figured out which content is capturing your audience’s attention, stopping them from scrolling past you, and winning them over enough for them to spend time or energy with you (in the form of tapping the “like” button or something similar), you’ll know you’ve struck a vein of gold. Follow it for as long as you can!
Traffic: Are Your Buyers Coming Closer to You?
The third type of important marketing metrics to track is traffic metrics. Website traffic isn’t as easily won today as it was 5 years ago. In fact, most marketers I’ve talked to are low-key freaking out about how AI overviews and snippets are intercepting so much of their traffic.
According to Swipe Insight, nearly 60% of Google searches end without clicks, making AI searchability and features incredibly valuable to visibility. But how do you get people to visit your website if they’re stopping at the SERP?
Here’s the thing: You have to adjust your understanding of what website traffic means in terms of user behavior. Five years ago, website traffic could indicate a myriad of things, including that someone was just curious, trying to learn about your topic, or actively shopping.
The good news is that website traffic actually indicates a higher intent to buy now.
NP Digital recently posted research showing that longer search terms correlate with higher conversion rates.
This isn’t surprising.
People typing shorter (1–3 word) phrases into Google are in the education stage. They’re looking for definitions, explanations, and options.
As users add more words to the query, they’re getting clearer and clearer on what they want. So, naturally, the more words in a query, the more specific the solution the user is looking for, indicating a better-educated buyer, which means they’re closer to being ready to buy.
Traffic is an extremely important metric to track — now so more than ever — because it no longer simply indicates brand awareness as it once did. Now, traffic indicates interest and even intent to buy, depending on the search terms and pages that are receiving traffic.
Your traffic numbers may be lower in 2025 and beyond, but the value of each unique user session is exponentially greater than pre-AI search.
Consent: Are Your Buyers Inviting You to Come Closer to Them?
Finally, the fourth marketing metric group to track is consent metrics. Consent metrics tell us whether someone is worth pursuing or not.
Because so many online users today give out their contact information so freely — or even have a slush email address they use for all opt-ins to separate the inevitable marketing emails from their daily-use inbox — to receive the incentive you’re offering, the opt-in alone isn’t enough information.
To measure consent, you need to look at your opt-in rates, open rates, click-through rates, and your unsubscribe rates as a relationship. Some unsubscribes are inevitable, but your overall unsubscribe rate should be minuscule compared to your email list growth rate and email engagement metrics.
Consent metrics — the constellation of these multiple data points looked at as a complete picture — tell you whether those you’re reaching with your marketing are giving their consent to be contacted by you and continuing to give that consent.
If your list size is growing steadily, open rates are consistently hitting 40%, click-through rates are consistently hitting 5% or greater, and unsubscribes are 1% or less per email, only then are you able to conclude that your nurture messaging is working.
Decision, Action & Retention Metrics
While visibility, traffic, engagement, and consent metrics are the most important to making sure you’re capturing leads far ahead of your competition and winning their trust and loyalty ahead of their need for your specific solution, it’s also important for marketers to be tapped into sales metrics.
Sales and conversion metrics include behaviors that happen specifically at the decision, action, and retention stages of the sales funnel. (If you’re not familiar with Cornell’s 5-stage sales funnel, check out this article.)
Typically, the sales team is in charge of tracking these metrics, but Marketing and Sales must be in constant communication about the performance of these metrics to ensure Marketing is hitting the right target audiences and buyer groups.
Decision metrics are usually indicated by activities such as people booking calls with your sales reps, people scheduling demos, and people asking for pricing, case studies, and other conversion-oriented assets.
These are MQLs that have decided that you are a company that they are strongly considering purchasing from, and these are usually the behaviors that occur right before they actually take action and choose you.
Your action metrics are going to be numbers such as closed proposals and conversions.
Lastly, your retention metrics will be figures such as lifetime customer value, churn rate, and average customer value.
If you’re an experienced marketing professional, this is likely a process of identifying KPIs that you’re already familiar with.
The important thing is to match those KPIs with the right stage of change in your strategy so that you can properly identify when certain parts of your sales funnel are not performing as strongly as they could.
If you’re not applying the proper meaning to those metrics, you risk interpreting the data incorrectly and making misinformed decisions that can cost you in the long run.
Learn more about the Stages of Change in my new book, The ELITE Method: Claim More Market Share with Psychology-Driven Marketing.
