Open any of these platforms and you are met with dozens of metrics, most of which do not change what you do next. The skill is not collecting more numbers. It is knowing the two or three per platform that actually signal whether things are working, and then seeing them together.
Cost per enquiry
Everything rolls up to one question: how much did each phone call or form cost you? Watch calls and form completions in GA4 and Google Business Profile, next to the spend that produced them in Google Ads. A rising cost per enquiry is your earliest warning sign.
Return on ad spend (ROAS)
Revenue divided by ad spend, blended across Google and Meta. Watch revenue and orders in GA4, product performance in Merchant Center, and spend in each ad platform. No single dashboard shows blended ROAS, which is exactly why it gets missed.
Cost per lead
Total spend divided by qualified enquiries. Watch form submissions in GA4, the searches that bring the right people in Search Console, and spend in Google Ads. Cheap leads that never close are worse than expensive ones that do, so pair it with lead quality.
The metrics that matter, per platform
Ignore the rest until these earn their keep. Each platform counts a slightly different slice of the same customer journey.
| Platform | The metrics worth watching | What they tell you |
|---|---|---|
| GA4 | Sessions, key events (conversions), conversion rate | How many people arrive, and how many do the thing you care about |
| Search Console | Clicks, impressions, average position, CTR | Whether people find you in organic search and click through |
| Google Ads | Cost, conversions, cost per conversion, ROAS | Whether paid search pays for itself |
| Meta Ads | Spend, results, cost per result, ROAS | Whether social ads pay for themselves |
| Merchant Center | Clicks, conversions, conversion value | Which products actually sell from Shopping |
Why they only make sense together
Each of those numbers is true and useful, and each lives in its own dashboard that never talks to the others. That is where small businesses lose the plot, because the questions that actually matter sit in the gaps between platforms:
- Whose number is right? Google Ads might claim 40 conversions while GA4 attributes 32. Neither is lying; they count differently. You can only reconcile them side by side.
- What is my blended return? Total revenue against total ad spend across Google and Meta is the number that decides your budget, and no single platform can show it.
- Which channel actually earns? Organic, paid, and social each take credit in their own tool. Put them on one axis and the real mix appears.
Answering these means pulling the same date range from four or five platforms into one view every time you want a straight answer. Done by hand, that is a morning of copy-paste and a spreadsheet that breaks the moment a metric is defined differently in two places.
This is the whole reason Clearly exists: one report that pulls GA4, Search Console, Google Ads, Merchant Center and Meta together, so the metrics that matter sit side by side instead of in five browser tabs. Blended ROAS, channel comparison, and the reconciliation between platforms stop being a manual chore and become the default view.
Start by picking the one number that defines a win for your business (above), then add the supporting metrics from each platform you use. Once they are in one place, patterns you would never spot tab by tab become obvious, and that is when your data starts earning its keep.
In the next chapter, the handful of mistakes that trip up most businesses when they first get serious about their data, and how to sidestep each one.