I would stop calling an increase a win until the team can explain what it means for the business. More impressions, clicks, leads, or rankings can be useful. Each can also increase while the company gets no closer to a valuable customer.
The problem is not that these metrics are worthless. It is that they are easy to observe and easy to mistake for the outcome.
Give every metric a job
Impressions can help explain reach. Clicks can help explain response. Leads can show an initial commitment. Rankings can describe visibility for particular searches. Those are legitimate diagnostic roles.
Ask what decision the metric supports. If a number is in the weekly report because it usually goes up, it may be there for reassurance rather than management.
Follow the next transition
When clicks increase, inspect relevance and what happens after arrival. When leads increase, inspect qualification and customer conversion. When rankings improve, inspect which queries and pages changed and whether those visitors have a reason to care about the business.
You do not need to demand an immediate sale from every interaction. You do need an honest explanation of the interaction’s role and the evidence supporting that explanation.
A hypothetical lead report
Imagine one campaign produces 100 leads and another produces 40 at the same spend. The first looks better until you learn that it produced two customers while the second produced four. The lead report was not false; it answered an earlier question in the journey.
Even the customer count is incomplete without knowing customer value, servicing cost, and whether the outcomes had equal time to mature. The correct response is a better decision process, not replacing one universal metric with another.
Keep a small hierarchy
Put business outcomes at the top, journey measures underneath, and activity measures below them. Use the lower levels to explain changes in the higher ones. Label assumptions where the relationship has not been established.
In a weekly review, ask: what changed, what do we think caused it, how confident are we, and what will we do? That produces a more useful discussion than celebrating every upward arrow.
The measurement guide shows how to organize those layers. A good report should occasionally make you uncomfortable. Its job is to improve decisions, including the decision to stop doing something that looked successful.
Co-founder and CEO of Stackmatix, startup advisor, and former Head of Sales at MightyHive. Connect with Matt on LinkedIn ↗ · More about Matt →