Without defining goals to measure your efforts against, it's hard to know how well you've succeeded, or even whether you've succeeded at all. That's why metrics for your marketing strategy are so important. Without benchmarks, you won't have empirical evidence to evaluate. You might be able to make anecdotal assumptions, but you will have nothing you can use to make definitive decisions.

Moreover, metrics alone can't always tell a complete story. For example, in baseball, hitting three out of ten balls pitched to you—30 percent—is considered a good batting average. However, in an academic setting, the same percentage is well below a failing mark.

What's the difference? It's context. Without context, you don't understand the relativity of numbers and different datasets to each other. Therefore, when it comes to evaluating the metrics of your marketing, you always need to consider the context.

There is no single "right" answer where metrics are involved. The right answers are...