Module 12 of 13

Analytics and measuring results

The four numbers a small business should actually watch, and why the rest are a distraction.

6 min read · free, no sign-up

Most dashboards measure the wrong thing

Visits, impressions and bounce rate feel like progress and rarely correspond to money. A month of doubled traffic from people in the wrong country is worse than a flat month, because it hides what is happening.

The four that matter

Enquiries, by source. Calls, if you can capture them. Quotes given. Jobs won. That is the funnel; everything else is upstream detail.

If you can only track one thing reliably, track enquiries and always ask how the person found you. A written tally beats a misconfigured analytics install.

Small numbers lie

With eleven enquiries a month, a move to fourteen is not a 27% improvement — it is noise. Judge changes over quarters, and be suspicious of any tool that reports a percentage without a sample size.

Beware double counting too: the same enquiry can appear as a form submission, an email and a phone call.

In practice — A Leicester tiling business

Their analytics showed traffic up 40% year on year and the owner could not understand why the diary was emptier.

The traffic was a single blog post about grout colours attracting people worldwide with no intention of hiring anyone. Enquiries from the service pages had actually fallen. One honest number would have shown it months earlier.

Action checklist

  • Ask and record how every enquiry found you.
  • Count enquiries, quotes and jobs won each month in one simple sheet.
  • Compare quarters, not weeks.
  • Check for double counting across form, email and phone.
  • Ignore any metric you would not change a decision over.

Free tool for this lesson

Campaign link builder does this lesson's work in your browser. Nothing is stored and no sign-up is needed.

Exercise

Build a five-column sheet: date, name, how they found us, quoted, won. Fill it for the last month from your inbox and call log. It will be the most useful marketing document you own.

Time needed: 1 hour

Read the source

Primary documentation, so you can check anything here rather than take our word for it.

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