Analytics & Measurement Guide: Knowing What Actually Works

Analytics for your business - Four numbers instead of four hundred.

Description

The purpose of measurement is to change a decision. If a number wouldn't alter anything you do, you don't need it. That sounds obvious and is almost universally ignored — most small businesses either measure nothing, or receive a monthly report of forty metrics that nobody reads and nobody acts on. Both produce the same outcome: decisions made on instinct, at some cost.

This toolkit cuts it down to four numbers you record monthly on one page, in about fifteen minutes. It shows you how to set them up properly, how to compare periods without fooling yourself, and how to turn them into an actual decision each quarter.

It's also honest about the parts nobody advertises. Attribution is genuinely imperfect. Anyone promising you precise attribution is describing something that doesn't exist. And for many small businesses the majority of enquiries arrive by phone and never appear in any digital report — there's a whole section on closing that gap, and the cheapest tool in it is a notebook.

The worked example is an electrical contractor spending $1,800 a month across three channels. Two of them were producing three enquiries between them and had been running for years, because enquiries had never been counted.

What's inside

• What measurement is for, and the difference between vanity and useful numbers
• The three ways small business analytics fails
• The four numbers, and why those four
• Setting analytics up properly — including the conversion tracking step most people skip
• Attribution, honestly, and how UTM tags work
• Capturing the enquiries you can't see: phone, walk-in and word of mouth
• Reading your reports without drowning, and what to ignore
• Comparing like with like — seasonality, small numbers, and before-and-after
• Building a one-page dashboard you'll actually read
• Tools worth using, and what to be sceptical of
• A worked before-and-after example
• Self-audit, ranked quick wins, 90-day plan, quiz, worksheets, glossary

Who it's for

Anyone spending money on marketing who couldn't say with confidence which part of it is working.

Who it's not for

If you have no marketing activity at all yet, there's nothing to measure. Start with SEO or Websites and come back to this.