Sorry, couldn't resist the in joke of the team I am part of.
But let me try an example. Visits as a global metric don't tell you much. They go up, they go down. And even if you do different marketing things (like SEA, newsletters, social media marketing, organic social and so on) and only look at visits from NY of these channels that doesn't tell you much (except for the volume).
But if you look at what a visit from every one of these channels costs you on average we are getting somewhere. Add into the mix the conversion rate for every one of these channels (depending on your goals it could be e-commerce conversions, newsletter sign-ups, sign-ups for a platform and so on). Now you can already see cost per acquisition/visit and cost per conversion.
So now you can answer the question about what marketing efforts bring more bang for the buck.
That is one example of how I define actionable metrics. Metrics that help you/enable you to make better business decisions.
How I would structure and report things depends on the business. But maybe this gives you an idea already.