The past two weeks have been heavy on metrics – from understanding the importance of metrics and how they weave together with your small business story to a breakdown on the different levels of metric categories that can help streamline your overall metric stack.

If you missed last week, your “metric stack” is just a small subset of all the metrics you can track for your small business, with these few important, core metrics helping you connect the dots from your tactical level metrics and surface metrics to performance metrics all the way up to the most important impact metrics that ultimately shape your business outcome metrics (the most important metrics tied to revenue, profit and other important growth/stability metrics, of course).

Following the chain of tactical > surface > performance > impact > business outcome metrics allows you to track and make adjustments to just a few key metrics that matter most and can create a causal, connected way of driving better outcomes – whether that is growth (revenue and profit), stability or whatever goals or targets you want most for your small business.

Setting reasonable targets and goals can be a challenge for a lot of small business owners, but ultimately you can go through the same process as mentioned in last week’s post: working backwards from your most important business outcome metrics (revenue and profit) and moving down your metric stack.

Start At The End, But Understand Where You’re Currently Sitting First

While working backwards to set goals is a great method to getting where you want to be ( something we do in formal mathematical proofs  ), if you don’t have an idea of where those metrics are – currently – the targets you set may not be calibrated for your particular situation.

An example of this is if you set a goal of 10,000 projects in 2026, but looking at your current booking metrics you only booked 10 in 2025 – this target is likely going to be out of reach unless something drastic happens in your market (and you have the capacity to take on that much work).

While high targets are ambitious, setting them unreasonably high (without a proper plan) can lead you to feel disappointed – and perhaps burnt out – when all is said and done for the year.

Go through your metric stack and understand what’s currently happening first and evaluate reasonable targets based on the current context inside – and outside – of your small business.

Less Can Be More, More Can Be Less

When we think about metrics we all have the idea of “more is better”, and for the most part this is true for business outcome metrics (revenue, profit, et. al.), but the further down the chain of metrics you go there can be situations where lowering a metric may actually be more valuable.

A really good example of this I’ve seen over the years is with website traffic (a surface metric that can improve performance level metrics like calls/form entries, etc.).

In many cases growing website traffic is a good thing, but if that traffic is not aligned with what your small business offers (irrelevant traffic), it’s likely going to mislead you into thinking that it’s something that always needs to grow for it to affect your performance metrics.

When you start dissecting metrics like website traffic setting a lower target can help sharpen your tactical metrics – 10,000 visitors that aren’t interested in your product (or are outside of your local market) isn’t as valuable as 100 that are interested or are in-market, so you can direct and adjust your tactics accordingly (to refine the website traffic surface metric).

Less is more until less should be more, more or less.

Set Milestones Along The Way

In ancient times, stones were set along a path to indicate some distance – or metric, like a mile – was covered; thus we have the term “milestone”.

With your metric targets set, it’s often good to mark milestones to track your progress over time. This is especially important if your targets are much more ambitious, or much higher than where you’re currently sitting.

If you set a project target for 1,000 in a year, perhaps you’ll set milestones for 250, 500 and 750.

Setting milestones not only helps keep you in line for your eventual target, but also gives you and your team a sense of achievement as you pass each milestone on the way to the finish line.

Like your final targets, milestones should also be set at reasonable and sustainable timeframes. If you want to get to your final target sooner, you can shorten the milestone timeframes – but keep in mind your current metric context (and project rate) to ensure it’s reasonable for you and your team.

What Happens If You Miss (Or Exceed) A Target

Every business (large or small) will eventually miss some target – there is no perfect prediction pattern record (there are just too many variables for this to happen in most environments).

While missing a target can be disappointing, the more important thing to understand is that you know that you’ve missed that target and can look to other metrics to get the story behind why it might have been missed.

Whether you’re off by 1 or 100, you now have the data – remember that there is no failure, only data – to pinpoint why you’ve missed some established target.

Backtracking your metrics from business outcomes to impact metrics to performance metrics down to tactical level metrics can help you craft the full story.

This can also work in the opposite direction – if you exceed a target, you now have a causal chain to credit for the improved business outcomes.

Now that you understand the importance of metrics and have your metric stack defined, what targets will you set to get the most out of your small business digital marketing?