“If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.”

The digital marketing world is full of endless metrics.

From basic, surface level metrics like impressions, views and clicks to form entries, emails, calls and texts to estimates/proposals, sales and reviews.

More advanced business/marketing performance metrics like qualified leads, conversion/booking rates, average ticket/project sale/profit (by service/project type), Return On Ad Spend (ROAS), customer acquisition cost (CAC), cost-per-lead (CPL) and customer lifetime value (LTV) can help you get an even deeper view into how your digital marketing is performing.

No matter what metrics you’re using to understand the performance of your digital marketing (and marketing in general), they will ultimately tell a story about your small business that is linked – in a measurable way – to your overall small business story.

While the “hard numbers” like the metrics above don’t always tell the entire story of your small business (there are always intangible elements that are hard to measure), they are an underlying, inevitable part of growth and running any business.

Data & Metrics Help You Understand Where You’re At

Without meaningful data and resulting metrics, it’s really difficult to understand exactly where you’re at, relative to past performance and competitors with the same alignment.

They ultimately serve as a starting point that give you a sense of where you’re currently at along any particular metric/dimension.

Even if you evaluate your data and metrics and find that they’re lacking or not where you’d expect, it’s better to know than to not know.

Unknowns in the business world are always present, so making a few of those unknowns, known starting with something you have full control over (like your data) is an easy way to get a reference point for your small business.

Data & Metrics Help You Understand What Actions Are Needed (And Measure Impact)

Once you have a handle on your data, it can help guide what your next moves should be (and what adjustments you might need to make) to correct (if needed), improve and grow.

Having relative reference points for your data over time, you can then identify which digital marketing moves result in positive, neutral or negative feedback in your resulting data.

As always, digital marketing strategy and tactics have to be viewed with appropriate context (data, again) to make them meaningful, but it’s vital to understand the causal relationship between actions and downstream data/metrics.

Knowing Your Numbers Can Help You Get Where You Want To Go (Faster)

I find that a lot of anxiety that happens with small business owners comes from not tracking or understanding their data and resulting metrics.

As mentioned above, data and metrics don’t always tell the whole story for a small business, but without them you don’t have the whole story.

With the entire picture of your small business in view, you can get more insights and make better decisions to get you what you ultimately want from running a small business.

I’ll be diving into some more thoughts on data and metrics in following posts, but for today I’ll leave you with a question to answer:

What data and metrics (marketing or otherwise) do I need to track to understand how my small business is performing?