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Running a Business

17 Key Business Metrics You Should Track

Noah Parsons Noah Parsons

12 min. read

Updated November 21, 2022

Successful business owners have one thing in common—They actively track metrics to achieve their goals. Learn what metrics to track with our full guide.

Building a business is a roller coaster of emotions and challenges. One day you’re up on the highs of your latest success. The next day you’re down, dealing with an HR issue or scrambling to find a new supplier.

Amid all that turmoil, you need to keep the ship on course toward your long-term goals. You need to know if your business is headed in the right direction, or if there are things that aren’t working well that should be corrected. 

While many business owners talk about running their businesses on “gut” and “instinct,” truly successful entrepreneurs rely on data to know how their business is doing. They use data to learn how they can improve tomorrow, next week, and next month. They’re setting goals and defining performance metrics – using those goals to drive their winning strategies.

Key metrics to keep in mind

Here’s a list of 17 metrics that are worth paying attention to. Not all metrics apply to all business types, so figure out which metrics work for your business and just track those ones. Also, it’s OK to start small. Even if you just start by tracking one metric, it will help improve your business performance.

1. Active users or repeat customers

2. Conversion rates

3. Customer acquisition costs (CAC)

4. Average revenue per user (ARPU)

5. Lifetime value (LTV)

6. Churn

7. Unit economics

8. Referrals

9. Net Promoter Score

10. Sources of traffic or customers

11. Cash and cash flow

12. Accounts payable and accounts receivable

13. Burn rate and cash runway

14. Gross margin

15. Inventory turns

16. Profit

17. Customer concentration

Metric definitions

Now, we’ll dive into each business metric, explain what it means and why it might be important for your business. We’ve split up the list based on how they may impact your business to give you a better idea of what you should focus on depending on your business type, industry, financial situation, planning stage, etc.

Again, don’t stress about trying to track everything. Figure out which metrics have the biggest impact on your business and just start tracking those.

Growth Metrics

If you’re looking to grow or expand your business, there are plenty of metrics you can track and consider. The following represent key drivers of growth and financial performance:

1. Active users or repeat customers

For a content website or subscription business, tracking how many active users you have shows how engaged your customers are with your site or product.

If you have a large portion of your users that are paying but not “active” – that is, not regularly using your product – then you might have a problem because people aren’t finding your service useful and they might cancel their subscription.

If you run a retail store, tracking repeat customers is a similar metric. You don’t want people to buy once, not be satisfied, and never come back again. You want repeat customers because getting a customer’s business the second time is almost always cheaper and easier than it is the first time.

2. Conversion rates

This is a pretty broad category, but it’s extremely useful.

A conversion rate is simply the number of people who see an offer, divided by the number of people who actually take action. For example, in advertising, if 100 people see an online ad and five people click, you have a five percent conversion rate for that ad.

Conversion rates are incredibly useful for tracking success in advertising, progress through online shopping carts, converting users from free products to paid products, and much more. You can even measure conversion rates in physical retail stores by tracking browsers versus buyers.

The key to tracking conversion rates is that you can then focus on improving a particular process, and know immediately if you’re making improvements.

3. Customer acquisition costs (CAC)

No, CAC is not the sound your cat makes when it’s coughing up a hairball. It stands for Customer Acquisition Costs, and it’s the average amount of money you spend to acquire a single customer.

So, if you spend $1,000 on ads on Google and get 100 new customers from that effort, your CAC would be $10. Ideally, you’re going to want to try and figure out how you can reduce your CAC over time so that your business becomes more profitable.

4. Average revenue per user (ARPU)

You don’t have to have “users” for this metric to matter to you. You could have customers, and you’re tracking average revenue from each of those customers over a given period of time, usually one month.

So, if you book $20,000 in revenue last month from 500 customers, your ARPU would be $40. This is a number that you’d like to move up over time—you want your customers buying more or signing up for higher price tiers.

5. Lifetime value (LTV)

How much are your customers worth to you over time? Do they subscribe to your service for a year and then quit? Do they buy from you four or five times and then never come back again?

Lifetime Value, or LTV, is the average value a customer will be to you over their “lifetime” of being your customer. If you’ve been in business for a while, you may have the data to determine this number. If not, there are ways to predict it.

6. Churn

A person “churns out” when they cancel their subscription or stop being a customer.

Churn rate is measured by dividing the number of customers you have by the number of customers who cancel. Churn is a slightly complex topic, so I have an entire post dedicated to explaining it.

7. Unit economics

This sounds complicated, but it’s not. If you know the Lifetime Value (LTV) of your customers and you know how much it costs to acquire customers (CAC), then you can do a “unit economics analysis.”

Unit economics is really just a fancy way of saying, “Are you making more from your customers over time than it costs to acquire your customers?” For example, it might cost you $100 to get a new customer, but that customer will spend $300 with you over time. The unit economics for this customer is simply the ratio of LTV-to-CAC, in this case, $300:$100, a 3x ratio.

There’s a great and very detailed post on this topic on the For Entrepreneurs blog if you want more information on this topic.

8. Referrals

For most businesses, their best source of new business is from referrals from existing customers.

I’m sure you’ve told your friends about the last great meal you had, or about a new online service that’s saving you a ton of time. Done right, this type of marketing is nearly free and more powerful than any advertisement, so it’s worth tracking if you can.

Find out who is referring your product and why they think it’s great. Use that data to build things that customers want. You can also use the percentage of new customers who come to you from referrals as a measure of how good your overall customer experience is. If referrals start dropping, perhaps something in your product or store isn’t quite right.

9. Net Promoter Score

This is related to referral tracking. Net Promoter Score (NPS) measures how likely your customers are to recommend your business to a friend. You use a simple survey to get the raw data and measure the results on a simple 1 to 10 scale. The question you ask is, “How likely are you to recommend us to your friends?” A score of 1 is the worst and 10 is the best. When you’ve surveyed your customers, group the results into these buckets:

  • Detractors: scores 0-6
  • Passive: scores 7-8
  • Promoters: scores 9-10

Calculate the percentage of your customers that are promoters and then subtract the percentage that are detractors. That’s your score. You want your number to be positive and try and push it as high as possible. 100 is the highest score you can get, but 50 is considered excellent.

10. Sources of traffic or customers

I talked briefly about customers that come from referrals. You’ll also want to know all the other places your customers come from.

Beyond word of mouth, are there advertising channels that work for you? Are there trade shows that help bring in new business? Track which sources bring in customers and which are just a waste of money so you can focus on what works and stop spending time and money on what doesn’t.

Health metrics

All of the metrics above are excellent metrics worth tracking, but at the end of the day, you need to focus on the actual money that flows in and out of your business. Here are the metrics to watch that keep your business alive:

11. Cash and cash flow

In business, cash is king.

If your bank account gets to $0, you’re in pretty big trouble. So, if you track nothing else, keep track of your cash.

Very closely related is your cash flow, which is the amount of money that moves in and out of your business during a given time period—usually a month. It’s a key indicator of your financial health. For lots of detail on cash flow, check out my detailed post on the topic.

12. Accounts payable (AR) and accounts receivable (AP)

AR and AP are very closely related to cash flow and are key guides to your company’s health.

In a nutshell, Accounts Payable (AP) is how much money you owe to your suppliers—basically the bills that you need to pay. 

Accounts Receivable is money that is owed to you—typically invoices that you have sent out to customers but that haven’t been paid yet.

Ideally, you don’t want either of these numbers to grow too much because that means that either you aren’t paying your bills or that your customers aren’t paying you on time. You can learn more in my detailed posts on accounts receivable and accounts payable.

13. Burn rate and cash runway

Leave it to Silicon Valley to come up with these dramatically named metrics. They’re really quite simple, though.

Burn Rate is how much money you’re spending over and above what you’re making. This number is pretty important for startups because they’re typically spending more than they’re making in the early days.

Runway is simply looking at your cash in the bank and figuring out how long your business can last at its current burn rate. Basically, you need your business to “take off” and start earning its keep before cash runs out. You can read more on these metrics in our post on burn rate.

14. Gross margin

Less complicated than it sounds, Gross Margin is the difference between what it costs you to make what you sell and the revenue that you bring in.

So, if you make bike parts, your costs are everything related to the actual manufacturing process of those parts. Subtract your costs from your sales and you have gross margin.

Gross margin helps you keep on top of how efficient you are as a company. Perhaps you can drive up gross margin by finding more efficient or cheaper ways to build your product, giving you more money to spend on other parts of the business. Read more about costs and gross margin.

15. Inventory turns

If your business carries inventory, you’ll need to track Inventory Turns. This is typically calculated by dividing the cost of goods sold for a period against the average inventory for that same period.

People typically measure inventory turns in annual cycles. This number tells you if you’re building up too much inventory or if demand for your products is slowing down.

16. Profit

No, I haven’t forgotten profit. If you’re tracking your numbers, you’ll certainly be tracking this one. That said, a word of caution: don’t confuse profits with cash. They aren’t the same thing and it’s very important to understand the difference.

17. Customer concentration

I’ve seen companies go under because they didn’t pay enough attention to this metric. Customer Concentration is the percentage of revenue you get from your largest customer or the top couple of customers. If the percentage is too high, you’ve got too many eggs in one basket and you should be looking to expand your customer base. You don’t want your business to fail just because you lose one customer.

Tips when tracking metrics

Test everything

It’s one thing to track your metrics, but it’s another thing to improve them. The only way to move the needle is to try new things and the best way to do that is with A/B testing. Try new landing pages, new advertising headlines, or even new store layouts.

Track and measure your results and figure out what works and what doesn’t. The key with testing is knowing what metric you’re trying to impact. Is it your conversion rate or perhaps your average revenue per user? Use testing to optimize your metrics and grow your business.

Only deal with significant numbers

It’s tempting to make some changes to your business, see the initial results and come to the conclusion that the changes you made were great (or terrible). That might not be the case, though. If you don’t have enough data, or if your data isn’t statistically significant, you might draw the wrong conclusions. 

Ask questions

What action would I take? The only metrics that matter are the ones that you actually take action on. Just skip the vanity metrics that you can’t (or won’t) do anything about. The best litmus test I’ve found to determine if I should track a particular number is to ask myself, “If this number goes up (or down), what would I do?”

If there’s nothing specific I would do, then I don’t track the number. Only track the numbers that help you make decisions.

Track your progress frequently

Tracking your progress not only gives you more opportunities to improve your business, it’s been proven to help you actually attain your goals. The research reports that the more frequently you measure your results, the better you will do.

—So, once you’ve identified the metrics that are the key drivers of growth in your business, make sure you measure them and track them as often as you can—at least monthly, but perhaps weekly for some numbers. Real time insights will help you adapt to challenges quickly and take advantage of opportunities when they come up.

Every business is unique and will have specific things that drive success. But, the metrics listed here should give you a good start. If I missed anything, let me know on Twitter @noahparsons.

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Noah Parsons

Noah Parsons

Before joining Palo Alto Software, Noah Parsons was an early Internet marketing and product expert in the Silicon Valley. He joined Yahoo! in 1996 as one of its first 101 employees and become Producer of the Yahoo! Employment property as part of the Yahoo! Classifieds team before leaving to serve as Director of Production at Epinions.com. He is a graduate of Princeton University. Noah devotes most of his free time to his three young sons. In the winter you'll find him giving them lessons on the ski slopes, and in summer they're usually involved in a variety of outdoor pursuits. Noah is currently the COO at Palo Alto Software, makers of the online business plan app LivePlan.