Calculating and Reading Marketing KPIs Correctly

Calculating and Reading Marketing KPIs Correctly: The Metrics That Really Count

Almost every marketing report contains the same ten metrics. A good part of them changes not a single decision and only fills space on the slide.

This article sorts the most important marketing KPIs according to whether they tell you something about your business – with formulas, one worked example running throughout, and a guide to measuring booked traffic properly. At the end there is also a figure on which we have to correct ourselves.

Vanity Metrics or Actionable Metrics? The Test for Every Figure

Take any figure from your report and imagine it rises by 20 per cent tomorrow. If no concrete action occurs to you, it is not a KPI but decoration.

That is exactly what distinguishes the two terms: an actionable metric triggers a decision, a vanity metric only looks good in the report. Robust metrics are ones you can influence, they are connected to revenue, and they stay comparable over months.

The 4 Most Important Marketing KPIs for Webmasters and Advertisers

These four are connected. If the click rate rises while the cost per conversion rises too, you have built louder advertising rather than better advertising.

Calculating Marketing KPIs: Formulas and a Worked Example

The following table works through a single example consistently: a shop that puts 400 euros into a channel in one month, gets 1,000 visitors through it and writes 20 orders of 60 euros each. The margin is 40 per cent.

Now the calculation gets interesting. The CPA of 20 euros stands against a contribution margin of 24 euros – so the channel pays for itself on the very first purchase, if only just.

The ROAS of 3.0 lies above the break-even value of 2.5, which confirms the same thing from the other direction. Incidentally, a ROAS of 3.0 is not automatically good: at a 20 per cent margin the threshold would be 5.0, and the same figure would then be a loss-making business.

And only the customer lifetime value shows the actual room for manoeuvre. If a customer orders three times a year over two years, they bring in 144 euros of contribution margin instead of 24 euros. Anyone who looks only at the CPA bids too cautiously and leaves channels to the competitor who does the further arithmetic.

Macro and Micro Conversions: Why the First Visit Is Rarely the Purchase

A macro conversion is the actual goal: the purchase, the enquiry, the signed contract. It is the figure everything is measured against in the end – and it happens for very few visitors on first contact.

A micro conversion is the step before it: a newsletter sign-up, a guide download, a click on the phone number, a product in the basket, 75 per cent scroll depth, a second visit within 30 days. Each of these is a measurable sign that someone is thinking further.

For channels at the beginning of the customer journey, that is the decisive difference. Anyone who measures reach channels by the macro conversion is measuring them against a task they do not have at all – rather like measuring a shop window by how many people standing in front of it pay an invoice.

So set yourself a separate target value for every micro conversion and observe how many of them later become macro conversions. This ratio is the bridge between reach and revenue – and it is the only honest way to demonstrate the value of a channel at the start of the funnel.

3 Metrics That Count as Vanity Metrics – And What They Really Show

The next three metrics often end up with the reputation of being worthless. That is not true. They are useful and in part indispensable – they simply answer a different question from the one many reports put to them.

Page views and sessions. They are the foundation on which all the other metrics arise in the first place: without visitors there is no conversion rate, no click rate and no sample large enough to say anything. They reliably show you whether your measures are getting attention and whether a channel is growing or going to sleep.

Reach is also the precondition for things that would otherwise stay closed to you: field data on your loading time, robust A/B tests and search queries that supply enough data points for the Google Search Console at all. So read page views as a quantity framework and put the conversion rate next to them – then you see whether more visitors also mean more conversions for you. Where the traffic comes from and how organic and paid sources differ is described under website traffic.

The bounce rate. It is one of the fastest indications that the ad and the landing page do not fit together. If a campaign page bounces considerably more than the rest of your website, the promise in the ad copy usually does not match what the page then shows – a finding you can fix in an afternoon.

Without context it is still read wrongly. A visitor who reads the phone number off your contact page and then hangs up counts as a bounce, even though they did exactly what you wanted. Together with dwell time and landing page, the bounce rate becomes a robust statement – and depending on the page type, a high figure is even the expected result.

Google itself has therefore turned the metric around. In GA4 the bounce rate is now only the counterpart to the engagement rate, and anyone who stays longer than ten seconds, triggers a key event or views a second page already counts as an engaged session. The same page can look completely different under the old and the new way of counting.

Domain authority. The figure comes from Moz and not from Google, it feeds into no search results and can barely be influenced directly – Moz says so itself on its own page. For a rough comparison of two sites – for instance when selecting cooperation partners – domain authority is usable. As a monthly target in a report it is time wasted, because nobody on the team can derive an action from it.

Measuring eBesucher Traffic: Setting UTM Parameters Correctly and Evaluating Them in GA4

Here comes the point at which most campaigns lose their own data. The eBesucher surfbar displays your page with the setting referrer: no-referrer – so your analytics is not given any origin and books the visits as "direct / none".

That is not an error but a deliberate data protection setting. It does mean, however: without tagging you do not see your campaign as a campaign at all in analytics, only as direct visits that apparently come out of nowhere.

The solution is UTM parameters directly in the target URL that you store when booking. Set them cleanly once, and every later evaluation works by itself:

The finished URL then looks like this, and this is exactly what you enter as the landing page of your campaign:

https://your-site.com/offer?utm_source=ebesucher&utm_medium=surfbar&utm_campaign=autumn-2026

You do not have to assemble that by hand – Google's Campaign URL Builder puts the parameters together correctly. Just make sure that your landing page also survives the parameters: if a redirect cuts off the query string, the tagging is gone again. Whether your page responds cleanly on the technical side is something you check in a minute with our URL test.

In GA4 you then find the campaign in the "Traffic acquisition" report under Reports → Acquisition, by choosing Session source / medium as the dimension and filtering for ebesucher. Set up a key event there for your micro conversions – that is what GA4 calls what used to be called a conversion.

Which KPIs to Measure a Reach Campaign By

The surfbar displays your page for a display duration that you set yourself; with the click ads the visitor stays for up to ten minutes and additionally leaves you written feedback on your offer. Both are contacts at the beginning of the customer journey, not purchase-ready demand from a Google search.

So measure campaigns like these by four values: dwell time on the landing page, scroll depth, micro conversions and the share of returning visitors. Why dwell time is more than a mark for effort is something we wrote up in the article on retention time.

What your bid costs in the end is decided when booking via an auction and not via a price list. So do not set the bid by feel, but calculate backwards: target value per visitor equals contribution margin times expected conversion rate. At a contribution margin of 24 euros and a conversion rate of 0.5 per cent, that comes to 12 cents that a visitor may be worth.

How to Tidy Up Your Report

In a first pass, delete every metric for which no action occurs to you. In most reports, four to six figures are left afterwards, and the rest moves into an appendix that nobody misses.

Set a target value and a date for every remaining metric. A figure without a target is an observation, and observations need no space on slide one.

Finally, separate the channels according to their task. Reach channels get micro conversions as their target, channels with purchase intent get CPA and ROAS – one target figure for everything always disadvantages one half.

Frequently Asked Questions About Marketing KPIs

What Is the Difference Between Vanity Metrics and Actionable Metrics?

An actionable metric triggers a decision: you can influence it, it is connected to revenue, and when it changes you know what to do. A vanity metric looks good in the report without anyone being able to derive an action from it. Whether a figure falls into one group or the other depends on the context – the same metric can be a steering instrument for one team and pure decoration for another.

How Do You Calculate the Cost per Conversion (CPA)?

Divide the costs of a channel in a period by the number of conversions from precisely that channel. 400 euros of advertising costs and 20 orders give a CPA of 20 euros. The figure only becomes meaningful in comparison with your contribution margin per order: if the CPA lies above it, the channel is a loss-leader.

What Is a Good ROAS?

That depends solely on your margin. The break-even ROAS is 1 divided by your margin – so 2.5 at a 40 per cent margin, and 5.0 at a 20 per cent margin. A ROAS of 3.0 is profitable in the first case and a loss in the second. That is why every industry-wide guide value for a good ROAS should be treated with caution.

Why Is the Bounce Rate Not Meaningful on Its Own?

Because it only counts whether someone leaves without a second interaction, not whether they were satisfied. A contact page on which someone reads off the phone number and then hangs up produces a high bounce rate with the user's wish perfectly fulfilled. Only together with dwell time, landing page type and micro conversions does that become a usable statement.

Why Does My Booked Traffic Show Up in Analytics as "Direct"?

Because the surfbar transmits no referrer for data protection reasons. Analytics then does not know the origin and attributes the session to direct access. As soon as you store your target URL with UTM parameters, the campaign appears cleanly separated in your reports again.

Which KPIs Make Sense for a Reach Campaign?

Dwell time, scroll depth, micro conversions and the share of returning visitors. Measuring a campaign at the beginning of the customer journey by the direct purchase rate regularly leads to the wrong conclusion that the channel does not work – what was measured was only a task it never had.

Which metric comes first in your report – and would it pass the test from the first section? Feel free to write it in the comments.

Good luck with the tidying up.

Your eBesucher team

Book traffic and measure it cleanly →