Overview of metrics

A metric is a quantitative measurement of a visitor action that measures differences in visitor behavior that occur as a result of changes you make to your site. Metrics measure the success of your experiment by telling you whether an experiment is winning, losing, or inconclusive.

Metrics are created out of events, which directly track actions like clicks, pageviews, form submissions, purchases, and scroll depth. After you create an event and add it to an experiment or campaign, you must decide how it is displayed as a metric.

Suppose your site has an add-to-cart button. You would use an event to count the number of clicks on the button itself. You would use a metric to track something like unique conversions per visitor for visitors who actually click the button and add an item to their cart.

You can have an event without a metric, but you cannot have a metric that is not based on an event.

Every experiment needs at least one metric. You can add or modify metrics at any time. View the metrics attached to your experiment on the Results page. For help with differentiating between events and metrics, see Difference between events and metrics.

Identifying the right metric is a huge factor in determining whether your experiment will have statistically significant results. For help with identifying the right metric, see Primary, secondary metrics, and monitoring goals in Optimizely Experimentation.

You can choose from several different metric templates, based on what you plan to measure in your experiments.

More information on metrics

• Types of metrics and when to use them
• Create a metric in Optimizely Web Experimentation
• Troubleshoot metrics that do not track correctly