Marketing is not the result of a few actions. It is and should be something woven into all business activities. It should be part of your email signatures, participating on social networking sites, etc. All of the little things build up and the thins which really help with building a presence.
There are legitimate marketing hacks but they don't involve tricking users. They involve living and breathing marketing, and realizing that building your business means a billion little marketing hacks, not a few big ones.
This is exactly what you are supposed to do in high-level RTS strategy. In Starcraft for example, you should know ahead of time what 'tells' you are looking for, and disregard the rest. It lets you focus only on the information that influences your decisions, and minimizes distractions from "scary" things the opponent may be doing.
That's an interesting approach, and seems like a really useful filter for quick sanity checks of the correlation or causation question.
My metric for metrics is to track things that will change your behavior. If a metric changes and you don't, then it's a pointless metric.
I've seen many companies track reasonable metrics, only to do nothing about them when they change. They just try to "do more" of whatever they were already doing.
Doing the right things with the right metrics is not a skill that everybody has and not everybody can learn.