The Metrics That Actually Matter in 2026

In 2026, most marketers are not short of data dashboards and charts, but what we are short on is clarity. In fact, most businesses are tracking more marketing metrics than ever before, but increasingly we're noticing marketing teams not really able to describe exactly what's driving leads, revenue, and growth. So, the problem isn't lack of data. The problem is understanding which metrics actually matter. So, today we're going to cover the digital marketing metrics most worth tracking and the tools that you can use to do that with, including using today's sponsor, Semrush. We're also going to cover some of the metrics that maybe you can leave behind. Let's first talk about businesses that generate leads, then we'll talk about e-commerce businesses. Usually, if your marketing activity is designed to generate leads, the main thing that you're tracking and optimizing your whole marketing activity for is the last action taken on your website. Let's say, for example, that you are in this business, Westminster Wealth Management. They book this free consultation call, they speak with an advisor to discuss their financial goals. The plan or recommendation is prepared, and that person becomes a sale. In that case, this booking of the free initial consultation via this form is a last trackable action that takes place on the website. So, this becomes the key conversion event to track. Now, of course, with a lead generation business, it's great to track conversions, but you're also going to want to track the performance of different traffic channels leading up to those conversions. So, let's take a look at an example. This company, Elite Renewables, is one of the companies that we own in our group, and the main goal of the Elite Renewables website from a marketing perspective is these quotes. We want people to click this button, or we want people to give us a ring. So, when we're measuring the performance of our marketing work, we're of course looking at the conversions, but we're also looking at the performance of the different traffic channels leading to those conversions. So, we bought this company in March 2025, when total traffic to the website was about 276 visitors. We rebuilt the website in July, we started to see an increase in organic traffic from 215 visitors a month up to now 1,300 a month, but we also started to run various ad channels including this cross network traffic. But of course, just tracking traffic volumes doesn't really tell us much. We also want to see the performance of that traffic and that's when we'd start to look at the quality of the traffic from each of these different sources and break it down by our key conversion target, which is those get a close. So underneath key events, we're tracking different conversion goals for all of the different things that we want people to do on the site. We've got that get a quote form. We've got people giving us a click. We've also got call tracking so we can track when somebody is giving us a call for the first time as well as when they're giving us a call again. So that might be an existing customer that has a service inquiry for example. So we can break down our performance analysis across any of these key events to see how each of those traffic channels is driving that key event or we can look at the performance of all of the key events in aggregate. So in this case, we can see that the traffic quality with cross network traffic isn't as high as organic search because although we've had almost 7 and 1/2 thousand total sessions for this traffic, actually the session key event rate or session conversion rate is 0.64%. So those 7 and 1/2 thousand sessions have turned into 200 key events. Comparing that with organic search where we've had a much lower number of sessions, less than 2,000 sessions, but they've generated 103 key events at a session key event rate or conversion rate in old language of 4.37%. So you might look at this and go, "Okay, organic traffic, amazing. This cross network traffic, it's kind of junky." Actually, the cross network traffic is so cheap that we will take these numbers all day long. In this case, this cross network traffic has also watched a video on YouTube. So we [music] know that it's pretty good quality even if the stats say it's not converting as well as the organic traffic. Another really useful set of metrics to track for lead generation businesses is the performance of different landing pages on your website and the performance of different devices on your website. And you can actually cross reference these against each other with this view. So, if you go over to engagement and landing page, you can see the relative performance of the different landing pages on your website. So, this shows you the top pages that people are coming into your website through and how they are performing in generating you leads or inquiries. We can see that on this website, the homepage is the top page that people are coming in through and we have a session key event rate or conversion rate of 1.82 %. This solar battery page is the next popular page and this has a session key event rate of 1.05. Remember that you've got different sources of traffic coming onto your website. So, usually if you're doing this type of analysis, to get the most useful insight out of it, you want to add some sort of comparison. And one of the most useful comparisons is actually to compare the performance of different traffic sources through the So, I've set up a comparison here to compare organic traffic against all traffic on the website. And this paints a very different picture showing why this comparison is so useful. So, here we can see organic traffic through the homepage way out performs the average all traffic bucket with a session key event rate of 7.65% against 1.82 for all traffic sources combined. Going down to this solar battery page, we've got a session key event rate of 9.52%. Now, this is on really small amount of data. This is on only three sessions. But as a marketer, I would look at this and go, "Okay, this page looks to be performing reasonably well." Here's another one, the air source heat pump page, organic traffic 13% conversion rate. Yes, only on eight conversions, but there's potential there with these service pages to drive more organic traffic to them seeing how well they're performing. Of course, this website is driving relatively small amounts of traffic, but you get the gist. And for some of our larger clients whose analytics accounts I can't show you, we're doing exactly the same analysis looking at the performance of different landing pages, different traffic sources, and different conversion goals to see where the opportunities are. Where are those green shoots of opportunity that you can accelerate behind, and where are the things that are really not working as planned? So, Google Analytics 4 gives you the really useful data about what's happening on your website. But, if you're generating leads, there's a whole other piece behind [music] this, which is just as important to track. And that's the performance of those leads in your sales team. And usually you would track this in your CRM. The key metrics that we like to get reports from clients are your lead to opportunity rate. So, how often the leads that the website is generating are turning into actual sales qualified opportunities, the conversion to customer rate. So, how often these inquiries on the website are turning into sold customers, the revenue per lead. So, the total revenue generated divided by the number of leads that have been generated, and ideally the lead quality by channel. Now, obviously you need CRM data to do this. Some of this you can do automatically. We're a HubSpot partner agency, so we set up HubSpot to track as much of this as we possibly can automatically for clients. But, usually we'll get the sales team to ask the customer or the lead or the prospect, "Where did you find us? What were you looking for?" Because that allows us to cover some of that gap. For e-commerce and transactional websites, obviously the website goal is incredibly clear. It's revenue, it's sales. Let's look at a larger business example, and imagine that you're on the marketing team at Holland & Barrett. Now, obviously if you're on the SEO team at Holland & Barrett, you wouldn't just be looking at your keyword rankings and celebrating. You'd also want to see the traffic coming through to the website and the sales, the conversions, the revenue generated by that organic traffic. And that's why for most of our e-commerce clients, we're looking at things like the total revenue generated by that traffic source, the average order value. So, what the average basket size is for that traffic source, the conversion rate, the percentage of sessions that turn into a sale. Now, we've got to be really careful with organic traffic and conversion rate because sometimes when you build the content site on a website, you can drive a lot more organic traffic to that website, but you can actually see your conversion rate drop because a lot of that traffic is informational, they're researching, or they're looking for something. That doesn't mean it's bad traffic. If that traffic generates any conversions at all, then it's a win. But, this just illustrates the danger of relying too heavily on setting one metric as your KPI. If you wanted to conversion rate max organic traffic, you cut out all informational pages on your website and probably just drive people through to your homepage and your product pages, which wouldn't make any sense. Some of the most interesting tracking for e-commerce sites in GA4 is in this purchase journey section under driving sales and in the purchase journey. This shows you how traffic moves through your website through the different stages. So, you can set up different steps in your funnel. For example, on this website, we've got uh the session start, so someone lands on the website. We've got view the product, so they go to a product page, add to basket, begin checkout, and purchase. And we can see how the users move through this site and what the abandonment rate is at each stage. Now, that's kind of useful. It can tell you that, oh, you know, we've got a big abandonment rate between viewing the product and actually adding to the basket. So, maybe our product pages are underperforming here or maybe we're getting some unqualified traffic through to our product pages. You can diagnose this a little bit further if you set up comparisons. So, I'm just going to turn on these comparisons. Now, we're looking at that same journey, but split between organic traffic, paid traffic, and direct traffic. So, people that have just typed the website into their address bar. And what this shows us is perhaps unsurprisingly, we've got a very different traffic performance per channel. So, the organic traffic is in orange, the paid traffic is in blue, and the direct traffic is in pink. We can see the relative performance and abandonment rates at each stage. And we can see that not all traffic channels are performing equally. The paid traffic, for example, we got a 47% abandonment rate at session start to view product, but then we've got a much higher abandonment rate between view product and add to basket at 92.8%. Whereas organic traffic, we have a bigger drop between the session start and the viewing the product because we have a lot of informational content on the website that people are coming through to. They're not always coming through because they have purchase intent. But when they do get to those product pages, the abandonment rate is much lower. So, that traffic tends to be higher quality if they get to the product pages. We've only got an 85% drop-off between viewing the product and adding to the basket. In this view in GA4, you can also see the different performance of different devices. And this can be very key for an e-commerce store if they have, for example, a lot of mobile traffic, but it's not performing anywhere near the level of desktop or tablet traffic. And if you're an absolute sicko, you can look at purchase journey against the different traffic sources against the different devices. And often for this type of thing, you might just want to export this as a CSV and throw it into ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude and get it to bring out those stories and those narratives for you because this isn't massively intuitive. If you want the team at Exposure Ninja to take a look through your digital marketing and analyze where your performance gaps are and show you the metrics that we would recommend tracking, you can request a free website and digital marketing review from the team. Just head over to exposureninja.com and click the button. We'll analyze your website, your digital marketing, your performance across lots of different channels, including organic search, paid search, and AI search. And we'll give you a prioritized game plan that you can follow over the next 6 to 12 months to significantly increase your revenue and your conversions. All of this is completely free of charge, but there is a catch. Not everybody is eligible. So, you do need to apply for this at exposureninja.com. Let's talk about some key metrics to track across SEO and AI search. SEO first of all. Typically, SEO performance is about rankings, traffic, and then conversions. Let's look at an example, LNC, a mortgage broker in the UK. In Semrush, we can stick their website in and we can get a good idea on their rankings and organic traffic. One of my favorite features about this view in Semrush is it shows you their keywords, but it also breaks those keywords down between the ones that are in positions one to three, like top of Google, four to 10, rest of page one, and then each page beyond that on Google. So, we can see from this that whilst they're visible for a lot more keywords, actually the total number of keywords on page one and positions one to three in particular hasn't increased that much. You can see in October 2020, they had 732 top three positions on Google. Now, whilst their total number of keywords has improved significantly since then, in January, they still only had 959 keywords in positions one three, which is part of the reason why their actual organic traffic from Google has stayed pretty flat. The other reason behind their organic traffic staying pretty flat or maybe even dropping slightly recently is that AI overviews are going to be cannibalizing some of that traffic, but we'll talk about that in a minute. We can also see the split between total organic traffic and branded traffic. So, branded traffic is people that are Googling your brand name. This can be really interesting because often you'll see an increase in branded traffic if you improve your visibility in AI search tools like ChatGPT, like Claude, and like AI overviews. Again, we'll come back to that in a minute. Semrush also gives you a really nice view on what your competitors are doing and how well. So, if we just stick in here, um lnc.co.uk, and we go to the competitor section, we can see that LNC has the most keywords and traffic. Here are where all their competitors sit. If we have a particular competitor we're interested in, we can dig in to see which keywords they're ranking for and if there are any keywords that they think are a particular priority and they're paying to advertise against those, we can go and see what they're doing in PPC as well. Of course, the important thing with these sorts of metrics for SEO is that rankings aren't the ultimate goal. They're a leading indicator. Rankings should bring traffic which should bring conversions and it's really important that we stay anchored on the true goal of all of this, which is those conversions. This data is super useful to see what are doing, where they're putting their time and energy and how it's going for them. But, for your own marketing and for your own performance evaluation, we always try and tie things back to conversions and ideally revenue. Let's talk about AI search because AI search is a huge new platform that is a massive focus for a lot of marketers, but it brings its own new set of metrics to track as if we needed any more. Now, one of the my favorite ways to track the performance of AI search optimization campaigns is Semrush again. They have Semrush one which allows you to see traditional search metrics and AI search metrics as well. So, let's stick L&C into Semrush's AI visibility and see what we get. Well, here's an example of a business that's doing really well in traditional search, but maybe has a bit of work to do with AI visibility. First thing you need to do is make sure that you've chosen the right country. So, in this case, L&C is UK based, so we've clicked the UK tab there. We can see visibility score is 38 out of 100, which is okay, but obviously has plenty of room for improvement. We can see that total number of mentions in AI answers has gone up as has their number of citations, so how often they are mentioned by third-party websites. Their number of cited pages, i.e. pages on their website which are cited in AI answers has actually dropped. So, this is an area that if you were working on L&C, you'd want to put a bit of time and energy into. Semrush's AI visibility overview also gives you distribution by LLM. So, this is how often your brand is being mentioned by each of the different AI tools. So, to ChatGPT here, clearly we have some work to do. Whereas, clearly AI Overviews is much happier to recommend LNC in its responses. Another really useful section is brand performance. Here we've stuck in one of our clients, zugucase.com. We've been working with them for a while now on their AI visibility. And brand performance gives you some insight into what these AI tools are saying about your brand, how they're positioning you. So, we can see, for example, that Zugu has the most positive sentiment of any of their competitor brands, even including Apple, whilst Apple does have a bit higher share of [music] voice for now. Semrush even gives us a breakdown of the key factors that lead to that sentiment. For example, the fact that Zugu's iPad cases are multi-angle stand versatility. Right, it's grading us on that performance. So, this even sort of ties into a product marketing and even business strategy. It really does give you an incredible level of insight into how you can improve your product and your business in order to win in AI search. And by the way, there's a 14-day free trial of Semrush One, which gives you access to this and the regular SEO metrics. There's a link in the description. You just go to exposureninja.com/semrush-one. If you want to run this research on your own, that is the place to start. And by the way, if you're wondering what went into this visibility and how we managed to generate this sentiment, firstly, Zugu has a fantastic product. Secondly, we built up their SEO visibility through all of the standard SEO playbook. We then followed the AI search optimization playbook that we roll out with all of our clients, which helps improve the quality of the content on their website and the likelihood of that content being cited in AI tools, but also their visibility and the number of mentions across the internet, in particular on the sort of key publications that these AI tools like to cite when they're forming their responses. And just like we said with SEO, it's great to track these metrics, but of course we need to tie it back to real traffic and real conversions. Where it becomes slightly tricky with AI searches that often AI visibility doesn't necessarily turn into a direct click. It can often instead turn into branded traffic. So that comes through organic sources. So you need to be careful when you're looking at the amount of organic traffic that you're doing, particularly if you're getting a lot of branded traffic, and make sure that you mentally attribute at least some of that to your AI search traffic, even if you can't precisely diagnose whether someone found you on ChatGPT or was told about you by their friend and they happen to browse for you. Now that's not to say that you don't want to track traffic from AI search. You absolutely do. In fact, HubSpot's new state of marketing report came out. It surveyed 1,500 marketers and 49% said their web search traffic had diminished as a result of AI search. But 58% said that the AI search traffic had much higher intent than regular organic search traffic. So what marketers are facing is probably lower overall traffic volumes, but much higher conversion rates from some of these traffic sources. So it's really important that you can track your AI traffic and conversions. This is something that we do for our clients by building them custom reports like this one here. Here's a client that we've helped improve their AI search visibility. So this is a custom Looker Studio dashboard that we set up for our clients to help them track their traffic from AI channels like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, etc. Importantly though, this only tracks the traffic that comes directly from those platforms like clicks on a link from one of those platforms to come onto your website. It doesn't track that branded traffic, those people that get an answer on ChatGPT and then head straight over to Google and Google for your brand. That stuff only shows up as branded organic traffic. So, we can see for example that this business has seen a large increase in their total AI platform traffic over time. And whilst their revenue is still relatively low given the size of this company, I mean, look at these year-on-year trends, right? That's up almost 1,000% year-on-year with total sessions up over 300% and this aligns exactly with what the HubSpot report found where total number of sessions clicking on links from AI tools is much lower than the number of sessions from organic traffic, but when somebody does click on those links, the value of those people is so high and this traffic is only growing. So, there you have it. Those are the metrics that we're tracking most often with our clients in digital marketing. The most important takeaway is to track the stuff that actually matters. Track the stuff that if you achieve the result with that metric, you'd be really happy. All too often we see marketers get hooked on one particular metric which doesn't really have a business impact and actually there are other ways of influencing that metric which might not be super healthy. So, try and stick as close to conversions and revenue as you possibly can. Then look for the leading indicators of those, things like rankings, things like traffic. They're important, but they are not the whole goal of marketing, really. We're all here for the conversions. And of course, you need to make sure you're using the right tools to track these things like our friends over at SEMrush.