The 8 Marketing Metrics Every Business Owner Should Track with Ally from Akari Digital

You hit play on a good one today, friends—and I never thought I’d say this, but this episode might just have you excited to open up your Google Analytics account and start looking at your marketing metrics.

I got to sit down with Ally from Akari Digital, and this conversation is a gold mine. If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by marketing data, unsure what to track, or how to know if your efforts are actually working, you’re not alone—and Ally is here to help.

She’s a data-backed marketing strategist who helps small business owners stop throwing spaghetti at the wall and start investing their time, energy, and money in the right places. After over a decade in digital marketing, she’s seen it all. In this episode, she shares real examples and breaks things down in a way that’s practical, simple, and totally doable.

So if you’ve ever said, “I know I should be looking at my numbers, but I don’t even know where to start,” this episode is your starting point.

We dive into:

• What metrics actually matter
• The tools she recommends
• How to identify your bottlenecks
  …and so much more.

Make sure you listen all the way to the end—Ally drops a major discount code for one of the most helpful tools to get you started.

Listen on Apple | Listen on Spotify

Who is Ally with Akari Digital?

I’m Ally, the founder of Akari Digital. My whole mission is to use data to help business owners figure out where to spend their time, energy, and money most effectively when it comes to marketing—so they’re not just throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping something sticks.

Instead of relying on trial-and-error marketing, we track, measure, and make sure the things we invest in actually move the needle.

Why do we avoid looking at the data as entrepreneurs?

The thing I hear most often is that tracking data feels overwhelming—like just one more big, complicated thing to add to an already overflowing plate.

People say, “I know I should be tracking this stuff, but even if I had the data, I wouldn’t know what to do with it.” It ends up feeling like this insurmountable task.

But I always tell people: you can start small. Seriously—just one thing, one place. Use a tiny bit of data to begin with. It’s a journey, and it might take a little time, but even the smallest steps can lead to real wins.

What are some of the biggest marketing metrics or data mistakes you see people make as they start to scale their business?

Hands down, the biggest mistake I see is people making decisions based on bad data—data that’s incomplete, set up incorrectly, or just plain wrong.

A lot of times, we open up a platform and just assume everything we’re seeing is accurate. But there’s an important step that often gets missed: actually checking.

For example, if your report says you made 50 sales this week or this month—does that match what hit your bank account? If it’s within a 5% margin of error, great, you’ve got a solid dataset. But if you’re not even verifying it, you might be working off of inaccurate info.

And honestly, making decisions based on bad data is worse than making them with no data at all. I’d rather see someone throw spaghetti at the wall than confidently head in the wrong direction based on incorrect numbers.

Google Analytics is one of the biggest culprits for bad data?!

One of the biggest culprits when it comes to bad data is Google Analytics—and I’m sure we’ll dig into that more later when we talk about marketing metrics. It’s one of the main tools most people have access to, but if it’s not set up properly, it can give you really misleading information.

The stat I always share is this: I’ve set up hundreds of Google Analytics accounts, and 90–95% of them were set up incorrectly when I first looked at them.

That can lead to issues like double-tracking page views or visitors, which totally skews your numbers. So you might think your page is only converting at 1%, but in reality, it’s doing much better—you’re just counting twice as many visits as there actually are.

You could end up spending tons of time, energy, and money optimizing a page that’s already performing well… or miss the real issue entirely, like not tracking checkout steps correctly and focusing on the wrong part of the funnel.

What kinds of things should someone set up in their Google Analytics?

Yeah, so the big one that you just kind of mentioned is setting up events or conversions. They’re called key events now in Google Analytics instead of conversions, but in general marketing lingo, you’ll still hear people say “track when somebody converts.”

Whether that conversion is a form submission—like signing up for your funnel, your freebie, or whatever—or a purchase, we want to track that.

But we also want to set up events for things like: how far down the page did someone scroll? Because if I’m looking to optimize a page, I want to know how far they scrolled, how long they stayed on that page—that kind of info helps me figure out where the actual problem is.

Instead of saying, “I need to hire a copywriter to rewrite this entire page,” what if you found out that people are scrolling, but they’re dropping off around the offer section? Or that people are landing on the page but not even scrolling at all? Okay—maybe it’s just the top that needs tweaking.

You can get way more strategic about how you adapt and pivot your marketing, instead of feeling like you have to throw the whole thing out every single time—which, let’s be honest, gets exhausting.

The other thing with Google Analytics—aside from how to use it, which I kind of went on a tangent about—is that people often don’t track things properly across platforms.

In the online business space, I’m willing to bet you have a website, a checkout platform, maybe Calendly for booking calls, or other tools. And while we might think of those as separate platforms, your audience experiences them as one cohesive journey.

So, we want Google Analytics to track across all of those touchpoints. That means installing it not just on your main website, but also on your checkout pages, your calendar booking forms, lead pages, or whatever landing page tool you’re using.

And it has to be set up in a way that tells Google Analytics: “Hey, this is all one site.” That requires some specific settings—you can’t just slap the tracking code on each page and expect it to work magically.

If it’s not set up correctly, your data gets messy. GA might think users are exiting and re-entering your site, which throws everything off and makes it really hard to trust or use your data effectively.

Do you use Google Analytics Dashboards with GA4?

Google Analytics 4 is a much better tool in terms of customization and what we can do with it. However, it’s also gotten to the point where you almost need a data person to help bridge the gap.

The built-in tools, the visualizations, the graphs—they’re practically unusable for most people. I honestly never go into GA4 directly. I always use a dashboard instead.

Setting up tracking in GA4 takes someone who knows what they’re doing. Even for my DIY version, I created a course-style walkthrough where I give you a template and show you the three little things to change—but that’s still not something most people could figure out on their own without a bit of guidance.

Dashboards are essential. They make viewing your data so much easier. I use Looker Studio, which is Google’s free dashboard tool. It connects directly to your Google Analytics account and lets us design custom dashboards for different purposes.

So, we can create one for analyzing a sales page, one for an opt-in page, one for tracking where your traffic is coming from, or where people are landing on your site. It’s super customizable.

Can you share some real-life examples of why tracking data like this is so important?

Yeah, the first example that comes to mind—of course, I won’t name any names to keep things confidential—but I worked with a client who had a pretty established business. She was consistently getting leads and sales, and she was marketing across so many platforms: Instagram, TikTok, her email list, three different funnels, paid ads, Pinterest, YouTube… maybe even more.

She was creating a ton of content every month and had a team of contractors helping her implement everything. It was all systematized and running smoothly—but she still wasn’t hitting her sales goals.

She came to me like, “Do I need to add even more? I feel like I’m doing everything I possibly can—what’s going on?”

So we audited everything, and one of the big things she was heavily investing in was Pinterest—especially Pinterest ads. When we looked at the last six to eight months of data, Pinterest had brought in zero sales. Maybe just a handful of leads.

Luckily, she had some historical tracking set up—her Google Analytics wasn’t perfect, but it was good enough for us to analyze. Sometimes when I come in, we have to wait 60 to 90 days just to gather fresh data, but in this case, we could dig in right away.

We ended up saving her over $1,000—maybe $1,500—immediately just by cutting Pinterest. It used to work for her, but it clearly wasn’t working anymore.

We redirected her focus to her SEO and blog content, which was bringing people into her funnels—and those funnels were converting. From there, we were able to pivot and make smarter decisions.

Just by tracking the right things, we reduced costs, saved time, and actually increased her revenue.

An example with a service-based business

So, for service providers—one of the things I see a lot is how websites can slowly turn into a bit of a Frankenstein. Over time, you add services, change things, remove pages, and before you know it, the site’s kind of a mess.

In this particular case, the client had a site where they’d added and removed services over time. The homepage had broken links, and to book a discovery call—the main thing they were trying to sell—someone had to click through four different pages to find everything they needed.

It didn’t really make sense from a user standpoint. And when we looked at the data, we saw that most people were landing on the homepage and 80% of them were bouncing right away. By the time someone made it to the “Work With Me” page, they were met with this super long application form.

Now, in some cases, a long form is totally fine—especially if you’re trying to qualify leads. But if your goal is to get more leads, adding friction like that doesn’t help. And in this case, a lot of the questions were just unnecessary.

So during our audit call, we shortened the form to something much more approachable. We fixed the broken homepage links. And instead of making people visit three different pages to figure out their next steps, she reorganized the content.

Now it’s like: If you’re this type of client, go here. If you’re that type, go there. She consolidated everything—pricing, how it works, and the application—so that the right person could find all the info they needed in one place.

And I don’t remember the exact numbers, but the performance increase for her website was astronomical.

What kinds of marketing metrics should we be tracking?

I always say: give me any business under the sun, and I can boil down their most important marketing metrics to about 8 to 10. Every single time.

Now, sure—those metrics might vary slightly. An e-commerce business is going to look a little different from a service provider, for example. But the framework is always the same.

We look at the four stages of the customer journey:

1. Reach – marketing that introduces your business to new people.
2. Nurture – building trust and connection with the people you’ve reached.
3. Conversion – getting them to take action and buy.
4. Retention – keeping customers, upselling them, or encouraging referrals.

And the key is to track entry and exit points at each of these stages. So just with that, you already have eight key metrics—two per stage. Sometimes, we’ll add a few more in the middle if it helps clarify what’s happening.

A real-life example of tracking these marketing metrics

Let’s use a service provider as an example—say, a photographer.

A photographer might be marketing on Instagram and also through SEO. While you could track individual metrics from those channels, we might zoom out and focus on: are people landing on your website? That’s the entry point.

From there, in the nurture phase, maybe they visit your services page. Or, if you have a funnel, they opt into your email list. You could track:

• Have they visited additional pages?
• Are they opening or clicking in your emails?

Those are signs they’re interested and engaging.

In the conversion phase, we want to see things like:

• Are they looking at your services or sales page?
• Are they filling out an inquiry form?
• Booking a discovery call or making that first payment?

Then in the retention phase, it’s:

• Did they book you again?
• Did they refer a friend?
• If it was a wedding, did they come back for an anniversary shoot?

So you can see—every business can fit into this same framework. And these are the metrics that actually matter.

Notice how “number of Instagram followers” didn’t make the list? Sure, that can be useful if you’re digging into platform-specific performance. But if you’re not tracking your customer journey first, then metrics like follower count don’t really tell you much.

Simplifying our marketing metrics

I find that if someone’s struggling to actually track their data, just hearing, “You only need to track 8 to 10 numbers,” feels much more doable.

And the power in tracking those marketing metrics is that it helps you identify where the bottleneck is in your overall marketing strategy.

If you think back to the four stages—reach, nurture, convert, retain—I’d bet that most people listening feel confident in one or maybe two of those. And then there are probably one or two that you’re like, “Yeah… that’s not really my thing.” And that’s totally fine.

But here’s what happens: when we want more sales or want to grow, we tend to double down on the areas we already feel good about.

So if you’re great at reach—like growing an audience—you might think, “Okay, I’ll just do more of that.”
But what you might actually need is to focus on conversion. Or maybe retention.

Tracking those 8 to 10 key metrics shows you exactly where the bottleneck is—and once you know that, you know where to focus your time and energy to actually move the needle.

What’s the first step for someone who wants to start tracking their marketing metrics more closely?

Step one is making sure you’re actually tracking the data you need.

Each stage of the customer journey—reach, nurture, convert, retain—has specific marketing metrics or data systems that support it. And unfortunately, it’s not as simple as saying, “Just follow these three steps and you’re good.” It’s a bit of a journey.

But the best place to start is by identifying your bottleneck, and then focusing on the data system tied to that part of the journey.

For most people, the two biggest things they’re missing—and these are critical—are:

1. Google Analytics
2. UTM strategy (which helps categorize where your traffic is coming from inside Google Analytics)

If you don’t set those up today, you won’t have that data tomorrow. It’s not retroactive—you can’t go back and collect it later.

Now, when it comes to tracking nurture, conversion, and retention, we also look at sales data and email metrics. But in most cases, we can get about 75% of the way there just by exporting reports from tools you’re already using—so you don’t always need a big, fancy setup right out of the gate.

That said, if you’re not using Google Analytics properly, and if you’re not using UTMs to track traffic sources, then that data simply doesn’t exist for you. And that’s where most people have the biggest gaps.

How can we find out what we’re doing that’s the most profitable?

In a world where we know people don’t just see you for the first time and immediately buy, we have to account for the fact that they’re going to engage with you across multiple platforms and over time.

Depending on how urgent the problem is that you solve, that time could be a few days… or a few months… or even longer. It totally depends.

That’s why it’s never as simple as saying, “This one marketing thing is the most important.”

Like—what’s more important, your sales page or your SEO? They serve completely different purposes.
You could have the best sales page in the world, but if no one ever lands on it—because you have no traffic—it doesn’t matter.

On the flip side, you could be crushing it with SEO or paid ads, getting tons of people to your site… but if that page is just a blank white screen with a “Pay Me” button, no one’s going to convert.

So within each of those four categories—reach, nurture, convert, and retain—you’ll likely have one or a few high-performing strategies.

It’s less about finding the one thing, and more about figuring out:

• What’s my most profitable reach channel?
• Which channel brings me the most people—even if it’s not the most profitable one?
• Which funnel converts the best?
• Which sales page or launch performed best?
• And within retention, which offers lead to repeat purchases or referrals?

Once you’ve identified the top performers in each category, then you can go deeper.

Take SEO vs. ads, for example. Both might be important, but to know which one is more profitable, you have to track that journey in more detail:

• For SEO: What keywords are you ranking for? How many pages are ranking? How much traffic are they bringing in? And how well does that traffic convert?
• For ads: Which campaigns are running? Which are bringing in leads? And more importantly, which ones are bringing in qualified leads?

That level of tracking is what I’d consider step 10 in your data journey.

But step one and two? Just start by tracking the overall customer journey. That’s the foundation.

Connect with Ally at Akari Digital

Yeah, so my business is called Akari Digital and I’m also pretty active on Instagram, where you can find me at @akaridigital.

And because I always like to give a little bonus when I’m on a podcast, I’ve got something special for your listeners. Since we talked a lot about Google Analytics today, I want to share my Google Analytics Self-Audit Tool. It’s a paid product, but I’m offering it to your audience for just $1 when they use the coupon code: KARAREPORT.

This tool includes:

• A dashboard to help you figure out what events you’re tracking
• Whether your tracking is firing properly across your pages
• A checklist and video walkthrough so you can follow along
• A bonus video that dives into UTMs and how to categorize your traffic

Grab it for just $1 using coupon code KARAREPORT here!

LINKS MENTIONED

• Grab Ally’s Google Analytics Self-Audit Tool Using Code KARAREPORT for $1
• Learn more about Ally at Akari Digital
• Follow Ally on Instagram
• Learn more about working with our marketing agency here
• Follow me on Instagram