Overview of metrics

A metric is a quantitative measurement of a visitor action that measures differences in visitor behavior that occur due to 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 from events that directly track actions like clicks, pageviews, form submissions, purchases, and scroll depth. After you set up events in Optimizely Web Experimentation, Optimizely Feature Experimentation, or Optimizely Personalization and add them to an experiment or campaign you must decide how it is displayed as a metric.

For example, your site has an add-to-cart button.

• You use an event to count the number of clicks on the button itself.
• You use a metric to track 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 Experimentation Results page or Campaign Results page. For help differentiating events and metrics, see the Difference between events and metrics.

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

You can choose from several different metric templates based on what you plan to measure in your experiments. See Create a metric in Optimizely using the metric builder for instructions on creating metrics.