Custom Metrics Walkthrough

Introduction

Custom Metrics in Lifetimely allow you to create tailored calculations and performance indicators that align with your specific business goals. By leveraging custom metrics, you can analyze sales performance, customer behavior, and marketing efficiency in ways that standard reports may not cover.

This guide walks you through creating, configuring, and using Custom Metrics effectively.

Where can Custom metrics be found?

Custom metrics are located under the Dashboards section of the app. From this section, you can:

• Create new custom metrics
• View and manage all previously created metrics.

How to Build a Custom Metric?

Create or edit a custom metric using the Custom metric builder and using the preview.

1. From the Dashboards tab, select Custom Metrics and New Custom Metric
2. Define the Formula: Use the keyboard or dropdown to input your formula. For example:
   1. Start typing a metric (e.g., “Total Sales”) and press Tab to autocomplete. 
   2. Use operators like division (/) or addition (+) to construct your formula (e.g., Total Sales / Marketing Costs).
3. Define a format for the metric:
   1. Percentage (%): if it's a percentage-based metric, i.e: % of total sales coming from the United States → ((Total sales filtered by Country = United States / Total sales) * 100)
   2. Currency ($): if it's a currency-based metric like Total sales coming from the United States → Total sales filtered by Country = United States 
   3. Number: if it's a currency-based metric like Orders coming from the United States → Orders filtered by Country = United states 
4. Set Trend Direction: Specify whether the trend is positive or negative based on the metric’s behavior.
5. Apply Filters (if applicable): Click to add filters like order or customer tags, countries, and UTM data.
💡 Note: Metrics, such as Marketing Costs, Net Profit, and Contribution Margin, cannot be filtered as they can’t be attributed to a specific order.
6. Validate the Formula: If there’s an error in your formula, the builder will not display the green 'Valid' message. Otherwise, if valid you the Preview should show the value of your newly created metric for the past 30 days.
7. Save Your Metric: Once created, the custom metric will appear in the Custom Metrics section.

Example Custom Metric

As an example, let's build a custom Marketing Efficiency Ratio (MER) metric:

1. Go to Custom Metrics > Create Metric.
2. Input Formula: Type or select from the dropdown: Total Sales / Marketing Costs.
3. Set the Trend direction: In the case of MER, in which higher MER is positive, Green if the increase is up, and red if down.
4. Save and View: Save the metric and it will now be available in the Custom Metrics section and can be added to any dashboard.
5. Add to a Dashboard: Edit your dashboard, select the newly created metric, and place it in the desired position.