Spell It Out: Core Metrics

Most of the disagreements people bring to me about whether their marketing is working aren't actually disagreements. They tend to be a quiet collision between two definitions of the same number, where neither party has noticed they're using different definitions in the first place. Conversion rate, engagement rate, bounce rate: people use these terms as though their meanings are obvious. They aren't, and the room that leaves for confident misunderstanding is a real and ongoing cost.

So I've started a series called Spell It Out, which takes the marketing words you keep seeing and explains what they actually mean, in plain English, without the layer of jargon that makes straightforward ideas sound complicated. This first piece covers five of the most-quoted numbers in any marketing report. They're the ones founders most often quietly google after a meeting, slightly hoping nobody notices.

Conversion rate

The percentage of people who take the action you wanted them to take, whether that's buying something, signing up to a list, or downloading a file. If 100 people land in your online shop and 5 of them buy, your conversion rate is 5%.

The bit worth knowing is that a conversion rarely means the same thing across two different platforms. Meta will count it one way, Google Analytics will count it another, and your CRM will count it a third, which is why the same campaign can look like a triumph in one dashboard and a flop in the next. Always check which definition you're looking at before celebrating or panicking.

Click-through rate (CTR)

How many people clicked on something compared with how many saw it. If 1,000 people saw your ad and 50 of them clicked, your CTR is 5%.

CTR is a useful early signal that your headline or creative is doing its job, but it stops being useful very quickly after that. A high CTR tells you the click happened. It doesn't tell you that the click came from the right kind of person, or that anything sensible happened once they landed. Treat it as the first question to ask, not the last.

Bounce rate

The percentage of sessions where someone arrives on your page and leaves without engaging further. A high bounce rate suggests your page didn't meet visitors' expectations, whether because the content wasn't what they came for, the design didn't hold them, or the page took too long to load. A low one usually means your content is giving people enough reason to stay or explore further.

Impressions vs reach

Impressions are total views, including the same person seeing your content more than once. Reach is the number of unique people who saw it. So if your post is seen 10,000 times by 4,000 different people, that's 10,000 impressions and 4,000 reach.

It's a small distinction with a big effect on how you read your numbers. Impressions tell you about visibility and frequency, while reach is the one to look at when you want to know how many actual humans your content has been in front of.

Engagement rate

The percentage of people who interact with your post in some way, whether that's a like, share, comment, or click. If 1,000 people saw your post and 60 interacted with it, your engagement rate is 6%.

The thing worth knowing here is that a high engagement rate means people reacted, which is not the same thing as them connecting with what you posted. Rage-bait, outrage threads, and pile-ons all score very well on engagement, which is why the number on its own won't tell you whether your content was working in the way you actually wanted it to.

One last thing

The point of all of this isn't to make you suspicious of every number you see, but to make the words on your dashboard mean something specific in your head rather than something vague. Marketing is full of metrics that look definitive until you ask what they're counting, and the difference between a confident decision and a nervous one is usually just knowing the answer to that question.

The next instalment of Spell It Out will look at the words people use about SEO. If you'd like the rest of the series as it goes out, you'll find it over on Insights.