What Metrics Should My Digital Marketing Company Track?

A vanity metric is a number that looks good on a report but does not help you make a decision. Marketing analytics company Improvado defines the difference plainly: vanity metrics measure activity ("how much did we generate?") while actionable metrics measure outcomes ("how is this activity impacting our business goals?"). Typical vanity metrics include total followers, raw page views, total likes and raw impressions.

The test is simple: for every number your agency reports, ask "so what?" If the answer leads to a specific action - shift budget, fix a page, reply to reviews - the metric matters. If the answer is just "good to know," it is vanity. A post with 10,000 likes that produced zero calls is worth less than a post with 40 likes that produced three appointment bookings.

Website visitors and where they come from. How many people visited your site this month and which channel brought them: Google search, Google Maps, social media, email or direct visits. Google Analytics (free) shows this. The channel breakdown tells you where to invest: if most customers find you through Google search, that is where your effort belongs.

Calls, direction requests and website clicks from your Google Business Profile. For local businesses these are often the most important numbers of all. Your free Google listing shows calls, direction requests and website clicks right in its performance dashboard. Industry data compiled by SQ Magazine puts the average profile at 59 customer actions per month - about 20 website clicks, 16 direction requests and 10 phone calls - and 53% of users take action within 24 hours of viewing a profile. Watch the trend month to month: rising actions mean your local visibility is working.

Leads and conversions. A conversion is any action that moves a stranger toward becoming a customer: a contact form submission, a quote request, a booking, a phone call from your website or an email signup. Decide with your agency what counts as a conversion and make sure it is being tracked. Everything else is commentary.

Cost per lead. Take what you spent on marketing in a month and divide it by the number of leads that month. That is your cost per lead - the single most honest number in paid advertising. WordStream by LocaliQ's 2026 Google Ads benchmarks put the all-industry average at about $70 per lead, but it varies wildly: auto repair averages around $30 while real estate runs over $100. Your number only means something next to your own history and your industry - a "cheap" lead that never buys is the most expensive lead of all.

Return on ad spend (ROAS). For every dollar you put into ads, how many dollars came back in revenue? If you spent $500 on ads and they produced $2,000 in sales, your ROAS is 4 to 1. This is the number that tells you whether to spend more, hold steady or stop. Any agency running your ads should report it every month without being asked.

Email engagement - clicks, not just opens. Email remains one of the highest-return channels - Litmus research puts the average return at $36 to $40 for every $1 spent. But watch the right email numbers. Open rates are inflated by privacy features that auto-open emails, so the metric that matters is click-through rate: the share of recipients who clicked a link. Campaign Monitor's 2025 benchmarks put the average email open rate at 21.3% and the average click-through rate at 2.3%. If your open rate looks great but nobody clicks, your subject lines work and your content does not.

Review count and rating. Reviews are both a metric and a marketing channel. BrightLocal's 2024 Local Consumer Review Survey found that 75% of consumers regularly read online reviews when researching local businesses and that 88% would use a business that replies to all of its reviews, compared with just 47% for a business that never responds. Track your total review count and average rating monthly - and reply to every single review, because the response rate is part of the metric.

You do not need a 20-page PDF full of charts. A good monthly report from your agency fits on one page and answers five questions:

1. What happened this month - visitors, calls, leads and sales, with last month's numbers next to them for comparison.
2. Where did the leads come from - which channel earned its keep.
3. What did it cost - spend per channel, cost per lead and return on ad spend.
4. What changed and why - what the agency did differently this month and what it is watching.
5. What happens next month - the one or two actions planned, in plain language.

Trends beat snapshots. A single month of data tells you almost nothing; six months of direction tells you everything. If your report shows only this month's numbers with no comparison, ask for the trend. If it is full of impressions and reach with no leads or revenue attached, ask for the numbers that connect to money. An agency that cannot explain its report in plain English is either hiding something or does not understand it either.

If setting all of this up sounds like a project in itself, that is exactly what our analytics service does - tracking, monthly reporting and plain-English explanations of what your numbers mean: https://klikful.com/services/analytics/