The Two Types of Metrics to Track For Measuring Success: Leading & Lagging Metrics | 116
When it comes to marketing, there are so many metrics to track that it can be overwhelming. However, when you are creating your business and marketing goals, you’ll find that some metrics have more influence than others. Understanding the difference between lagging vs leading metrics can help you make decision in real time and get the results that you are wanting to achieve.
What are Lagging vs Leading Metrics?
The names are a pretty good indicator of their meaning! A leading metric is what leads you toward a result. A lagging metric is measuring the result you see after the fact.
For example, the number of discovery calls you booked in a month would be a leading metric. I think we can safely assume that the more discovery calls you book, the more sales you could potentially make. The lagging metric in this scenario, then, would be the revenue or sales for a given period of time.
A Closer Look at Leading Metrics
As I mentioned, a leading metric is what leads you toward a result. Common leading metrics are page views, inquiries, podcast interviews, collaborations, social media posts, emails sent, and so on.
The big difference between a lagging vs leading metric is that it’s easier to course-correct a leading metric. Let’s say it’s mid-quarter, and you’ve only sent two emails to your list. You can write and send more emails. Sending the additional emails will likely change the end results (more engagement, more sales, etc.).
Despite how key leading metrics are to business success, we often don’t spend the time tracking them. However, by tracking your leading metrics, you can determine what steps to repeat (or stay away from) to achieve certain results.
A Closer Look at Lagging Metrics
A lagging metric measures the result. Typically when you think of metrics, you’re thinking of lagging metrics. These are things like clients booked, podcast downloads, email click through rate, landing page conversions, revenue, and more.
Obviously, lagging metrics are super important to our business because, typically, these metrics demonstrate your business’ success. But as I mentioned, when you see your lagging metrics performing well, I would think back to what influenced that outcome (AKA look at your leading metrics).
Can a Metric Be Leading and Lagging?
I don’t want to confuse you, but sometimes a metric can be both leading and lagging. It just depends on how you look at it. For example, let’s think about email list growth.
Growth in your email list could be a leading metric if you look at it from the perspective of increased sales that come from your emails (🤞 more subscribers = more sales). However, it would be a lagging metric when looking at the success of your list building Facebook ads (better ads = more subscribers = more sales).
Lagging vs Leading Metrics in Facebook Ads
Speaking of Facebook Ads, I want to mention a few of the lagging vs leading metrics to look at when running ads.
Leading Metrics: impressions, click through rate, landing page views, and money spent
Lagging Metrics: cost per lead, landing page conversion, and number of email subscribers
Remember, making changes that impact the leading metrics will likely also impact your lagging metrics. It is the leading metrics you have more immediate control over, so don’t ignore them!
I hope having a better idea of lagging vs leading metrics helps you see why all different types of metrics are important! And that just because things are going “wrong” doesn’t mean you can’t pivot or course-correct in real time.
Don't forget to follow me on Instagram @heyitsjenzaia and tune in next Saturday for more business tips and strategies!
xo, Jenzaia
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Episode Transcript:
Hey there - I'm Jenzaia and this is Market Scale Grow - a podcast created for ambitious teacherpreneurs looking to have a bigger impact on the world, achieve freedom, flexibility, and ultimately make more money. With weekly strategy sessions and inspiring stories from fellow teachers just like you, my goal here is to help you create a customized marketing strategy so you can grow your teacher business beyond your wildest dreams.
Welcome back to this Saturday strategy session. I am super excited to be here, as always, recording for you. And today we're talking about little wins in marketing and more importantly, the difference between some of the metrics that you might encounter.
In marketing we talk about leading metrics and lagging metrics. And so what those differences are and how you can celebrate wins big and little with leading metrics and as well with lagging metrics. So let's get started with a quick definition of leading versus lagging metrics, and then I will dive more into leading metrics with more description and examples and why they're important.
Then we'll talk about lagging metrics, what they are, some examples and why they're important. And then we'll finish it up on how you can use leading metrics and lagging metrics together. Okay, so let's dive in!
First of all, the names of leading and lagging metrics kind of give away what they are, but a leading metric is the metric that is leading into the result, whereas the lagging metric is measuring the result or what comes after.
A really quick, easy example would be the leading metric is number of sales calls booked or number of discovery calls booked, whatever you might call them. And then the lagging metric is sales made. So leading into the result is the number of calls that you book, and then out of the calls would be the result itself.
So you can kind of see how they work together. And obviously a leading metric again would be that number of sales calls booked. And then a lagging metric could be annual revenue. But those don't necessarily bump up against each other; they don't directly correlate. Whereas the sales calls booked versus sales made would correlate to one another because typically the more sales calls you book, the more sales you will make.
When you're first getting started, sales calls can be really hard. Your conversion rate might be a little bit lower, but as you book more and more sales calls, you're more likely to make more. So that's kind of a little bit of an overview of leading versus lagging metrics, and so let's jump into leading metrics and talk more about exactly what they are. So more examples and most importantly, why they're important. So as I said, these are the ones that are going to lead into the results. They really are the metrics that help predict your future success.
They're not definite indicators, but they are going to be the ones that predict your future success. And so some examples of leading metrics are the number of DM’s sent, and these could be like those “Hey girl” messages 😂. I put a laughing emoji face beside that because I don't recommend you start sending hey girl messages!
But if DM conversations are part of your sales strategy, then number of DM’s, or conversations started, could be a leading metric that you track. Page views, number of sales calls or applications that are booked or completed, referrals received, the number of hours you've worked, number of registrations for a webinar or an event, number of podcast interviews that are booked as a guest, and social media posts per week. These are all leading metrics. They all predict success.
Now I'm not correlating 100% all of these things to other ones, and I specifically looked at my list and saw hours worked. I am absolutely not saying the more hours you work, the more success you will have. No. There is a 100% ability to work less and get an extreme amount of success. It just all depends on how you built your business, but tracking the number of hours you work can be part of your success metric.
Backing up to page views. For example, if we're talking about an email opt-in, the more page views you get, likely the more email subscribers you're getting, the more applications you get. The more people in your program, the more referrals, the more sales, more registrations for your webinar.
The more social media posts, the more visible you are. So there could be leading metrics. Like customer complaints, for example. That's a really great one. If you're tracking customer complaints, that could be a leading metric. And the less customer complaints you get, the better. And like I said, the list that I initially gave was almost entirely the more, the better. But there's definitely other examples of fewer is better.
So leading metrics…because they're happening in the moment and you're tracking them as they're happening, you have more of an ability to course correct. So let's just say you wanted to make 10 sales this month, and you know that you close 50% of the sales calls you're on, and so that means you need to get onto 20 sales calls. Well, if it's week three of the month, and you've only done three sales calls, you have to do 17 more. And so you can use the data, the leading metric of sales calls booked to help you track throughout the month. Are you on course or are you off course? Are you ahead? And this is the same for pretty much all of them.
If you want to be messaging 10 people a week and on Wednesday you've messaged 20 people, well, you know that you're ahead. That's one of the huge benefits of tracking leading metrics is that you have the ability to course correct right then and there and to drive your success in the direction that you want it.
And these are in-progress goals, right? So they're really great to track your progress through the month, through the quarter, through the year. And I do recommend, when I set these, you can have really big ones for the entire year, but for me, it's easier to break these down into monthly metrics that I track.
Even in a launch, if you wanna do 50 sales and you are converting 2%...
I'm pulling out the calculator. I am a math person, but I'm not super great at that kind of thing.
Okay, well that's insane. So let's, well, it's not really insane, but let's just say you convert 2% of the people who view your sales page. You want 50 sales? Well, that's 2,500 views of your sales page. So in that time-frame of your launch, you can be tracking those page views and you see you’re in the thousand views…1500 views…2000 views, and if those views aren't getting up as high as you need them or as high as you want them, then you can make adjustments to your launch strategy.
You can go live again, you can send out additional emails, you can do whatever things that make sense for you and your business to help boost those sales page views to get you the sales that you need. And then for that negative example that I gave before, let's just say you're tracking customer complaints.
My husband works for FritoLay, which is a division of PepsiCo. And so customer complaints are a thing that they get, right. There's a number on the back of every chip bag with an address and probably a website or an email address. So they track customer complaints and if customer complaints are low, then it means that they've been doing a good job and that sales are probably going to increase.
Whereas if complaints are high, they're not doing a great job, sales might decrease because people are dissatisfied. Side note: FritoLay has a huge monopoly of chips. Especially chips that I like to eat. They also own Ruffles and they also own Miss Vicky's. So all of the chips that I eat are Frito-Lay chips. So even if I'm mad at Miss Vicky's - their salted vinegar ones - and I wanna go to Ruffles, I'm still buying from FritoLay. But you get my point, like if customer complaints are high, then sales might drop because people are saying, well, I'm gonna go try the local president's choice. Whatever it might be.
And then the last thing that you can use leading metrics for that I really love is to help you determine how your lagging metrics were achieved. So it helps you to know what you should repeat or how you can improve the process and or results going forward. So back to that sales call example, where you wanted to make 10 sales, you close 50% of your calls. And you noticed that this month you switched up the script and your sales increased or they decreased.
So let's just say that they increased and now you closed 80% of your calls. So instead of needing to get onto 20 calls, you only need to get onto 12 calls or whatever it is. So like knowing that information is really, really powerful because it can help you to say, okay, well that was really working. And because I'm tracking my sales call, I'm tracking my close rate. I know when something is really helping it or if it's.
So that is leading metrics and like I said, it's really great to track those. Let's just actually pause before we go on to lagging metrics, specifically looking at Facebook ads and some leading metrics of Facebook ads that I track.
So the first leading metric that I track is impressions, and that's a number of people who viewed the ad. The second one that I track is CTR, so that's the link click through rate, and that's the percentage of people who are actually clicking on the ad to go to the landing page. And then the third one that I track is landing page views, because all of these are determinants and there are things that I can have somewhat of an impact on.
And if I notice that the impressions are low, if I notice the CTR is low, if I'm noticing the landing page views are low, then I can make adjustments to the ads. Potentially make adjustments to the images or the ad copy, or whatever it might be to help to increase the impressions, CTR, and number of landing page views that we're getting.
Another one would be the loading speed of the landing page. It can sometimes deter people. They'll click on the link and then it's just taking forever for the landing page to load, and they X out. So those are some of the leading metrics because in this campaign, the lead generation campaign, my goal is to get email subscribers, so that would be my lagging metric, the number of subscribers.
And so all of these other pieces leading up to that are the leading metrics that have almost an immediate impact on. I can make adjustments, and again, like I said before, course correct if things are going awry. The other one that I can do is the budget, the amount of money spent. So if things are going well, I can increase the budget. Which is going to increase the impressions, which is going to increase the landing page views. And so that's another leading metric that I track that I have the ability to adjust.
Lagging metrics. These are metrics of past performance. They've already happened. They're the results. These are usually, when we think of metrics, what we're thinking of; the bigger ones. So it would be things like new clients acquired, sales numbers or revenue numbers, either for a month or a quarter or the entire. Something like your email, click rates, or potentially even your email open rates, podcast downloads, your sales page, conversion rate, your landing page, email opt-in, that landing page conversion rate.
These are all examples of how the specific thing actually performed, and these metrics are so great for checking in after the fact and also reflecting or making analysis of if something went wrong. If you didn't hit your goals, trying to figure out why. And then looking at the leading metrics to help determine what went wrong and how you went off course.
And then using the two of them together to determine what you're going to do forward. And so in Facebook ads specifically, that lead generation funnel that I was talking about, your two lagging metrics that you'll be tracking would be the landing page conversion rate and the number of email subscribers.
I guess there's a third one too. It would be cost per lead, and that is looking at how much you paid for each person to get on your email list. So those are three that you can look at and actually combine. It's kind of like all of the metrics that I look at. Half of them are leading metrics, half of them are lagging metrics.
We're looking at them every single day. And even though lagging metrics are a reflection of the past performance, if you notice that you're not meeting your goals, you can still make tweaks. To change those leading metrics to impact the lagging metrics sooner. So just because it's a lagging metric doesn't mean you would wanna close your eyes to it and not pay any attention. If you're not paying attention to that lagging metric just because it's a measure of the past, like let's say your annual revenue, for example.
It's the end of March when I'm recording this. And so if I just close my eyes to my annual revenue and I don't look at how January, February, and March have gone, then I can't forecast and predict March and April and May and June and July, August, September, October, November, December.
I'm giving you a lesson of the months of the year now. Oh gosh, Jenzaia, you're ridiculous!
I don't need to wait for the year to be done to look at that lagging metric. I can look at how quarter one went so that I can make decisions about quarter two and three and four. And so that I can make decisions about the leading metrics that I want to really make an effort to pay attention to.
One question that I've talked about with people is, can a metric be both a leading and a lagging metric? And the answer is yes, absolutely. So if we use the customer complaints as the metric that we're looking at, it is a leading metric. As I was explaining before, if there's less complaints, sales may go up because people are satisfied.
They're like, oh, I want another bag of salt and vinegar. Those are my favorite chips. I love salt and vinegar chips, which is why they keep coming up! So there's no complaints about it. People are like, oh, they were so good. I'm gonna get another bag.
The Super Bowl just happened. Well, six weeks ago now. It did not just happen by any means. But I'm thinking about how we had some great salt and vinegar chips for the Super Bowl. I'm gonna get some more for March break, which also just happened here. Or like Easter weekend.
Whereas if complaints are high, then sales might decline. And so in this case, sales is the lagging metric. But now let's look at customer complaints as the lagging metric. And the leading metric for that would be more behind the scenes on the factory line work area.
So if the workers are paying attention to the requirements, like salt level requirements, moisture level requirements, oil level requirements…I should get my husband on to talk more about this!
And so they measure salt levels and moisture levels and oil levels. And so these are those leading metrics. Is the salt within the right range? Is the moisture within the right range? Is the oil level within the right range? Is there a right amount of air in the bag so that when they're packed and shipped, the bags don't get all crunched, and then people are getting just like crumbly chips because people want the full size chips.
So those metrics - oil level, salt level, moisture level - if they're all within spec, within the proper range, then presumably customer complaints would be low. And in that case, the customer complaints are the lagging metric to say whether or not the employees were doing their job.
And if complaints were high, you would wanna look back and say, okay, well what wasn't in spec? Did somebody mislabel the bags? Because of human error, right? Like was it salt and vinegar chips going into a barbecue chip bag or something like that?
There are checks and balances in place, so that shouldn't happen. Just giving is kind of ridiculous examples right now, but just to make the point that if the factory workers are doing their job and making sure everything is running properly, then complaints should be low and sales should be high.
Whereas if they're not doing their job, they're kind of being lazy, things are either just outta spec or they don't wanna get ridden up or like whatever it is, and so they're like fudging numbers. (I'm assuming this does not happen, but like let's just imagine.) And then they're not course correcting, they're not paying attention. Then the chips are terrible and complaints occur. And then sales decrease because people are like, well, I wanna go try some other chips that hopefully taste better than this garbage. So that is one example of how outside of the marketing space, a metric could be both a leading and a lagging metric.
Now let's talk about email subscribers and how that one can be a leading and lagging metric. So if we're talking about Facebook ads, and the number of landing page views that someone gets, that's a leading metric.
We wanna increase the landing page views because then more people will opt in and the result is email list subscribers. As a leading metric for email list subscribers, the more subscribers that you have, the more people are gonna be opening your emails. Hopefully more people are gonna be clicking on your emails, which would mean there's more sales.
So as you're increasing your email list, this is your leading metric. You are trying to get more subscribers, increase that so that more people are opening and clicking on your emails. And then your lagging metric would really be the sales that are coming from the emails.
When you're thinking about leading and lagging metrics, you really need to think about what your goals are so that you can identify where they fall into the bigger picture, and then you can make decisions about things like what choices you're gonna make, what adjustments you're gonna make, and to celebrate. And so if we back up to quarter four of 2022, one of my goals was to get more visible through collaborations. And so the leading metric that I chose to track was pitching myself.
I had to pitch myself 30 times to either be in conferences, summits, be a guest on somebody's podcast, if there were any press opportunities that came my way that could count as a pitch if I actually applied for it or reached out or whatever it is. And so that was a leading metric that I was observing is how many times can I pitch?
And then the lagging metric that I was looking at was how many times was I successful? How many times did someone say yes? Which, by the way, all of the pitches that I did and all of the successful results that I had were conferences, summits, and guesting opportunities. I did not pitch myself for any press opportunities, but that's a side note. It would've counted.
And then if we kind of shift a little. The number of successful opportunities I got could be considered a leading metric for increased visibility as my ultimate lagging metric. Am I becoming more visible? And then one of the things that I could track that through was like, are my podcast downloads increasing? Because when I'm on someone else's podcast or summit, I typically say, come find me on Market Scale Grow.
So increase podcast download. Would be that metric. The lagging metric of success, and I have almost no control over that. What I have control over is how many guesting opportunities I had. But what I really, really, really have control over is how many times I pitch myself, because I can't control if they say yes or no.
And then I also can't control if someone who's listening to that presentation chooses to go download. But what I do have control over, and is SO important…We only have control over so many things, and by backing up to find that leading metric that we really, really, really have control over helps you to have control in your business, and to lead your business in the direction you want.
So, like I said, my ultimate goal was visibility, but I don't really have control over that. What I have control over is pitching myself to other people, pitching myself to opportunities. And same with that FritoLay example with the chips. They don't really have control over the sales. They don't really have control over customer complaints. What they really, really have control over is how good of a job their employees are doing. Are their employees respecting the specs and guidelines that they've put in place to ensure that every single bag of chips goes out tasting the same high quality, amazing, delicious salt and vinegar chips that Jenzaia knows and loves?
If there's a result that you're struggling to achieve, or you know by the end of this year, this is the result you want, think about what those leading metrics are that you have control over and that you can track. That way you can course correct as you're approaching the timeline or as you are succeeding in your goal so that you have control and can really drive your business in the right direction.
I really hope that this podcast was helpful and that you are able to sit down, look at some of those metrics and find those wins. you are going to see success when you're looking at these micrometrics, instead of just looking at the final result, because that final result can be so big and overwhelming and impossible. But if you break it down to what you actually have control over and really say like, I need to book three sales calls every single week. That's manageable.
Thank you again for listening. I'll be back with another behind the scenes strategy session next week. These are some of the most popular episodes, so make sure that you're subscribed so that you'll be the first to know when that episode drops!
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