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You’re running a real business. You’ve been at this for years. And somewhere in the back of your mind, you know you should probably be paying more attention to the numbers.
But every time you sit down to look at them, one of two things happens.
Either you open your analytics, see a wall of data, and quietly close the tab. Or you start tracking everything: open rates and follower counts and website visits and reach and impressions and engagement rate, and end up with a spreadsheet full of numbers you never actually use.
Neither of these is helping you. And neither of them is your fault. Nobody ever told you which numbers actually matter for a business like yours.
Here’s the thing: tracking your marketing isn’t about measuring everything. It’s about measuring the right things, consistently, so that when something isn’t working, you can actually figure out why.
Why most business owners end up tracking nothing (or everything)
The problem isn’t motivation. You want to know what’s working in and for your business. The problem is that the online world will happily suggest you track your Instagram followers, your reach, your impressions, your saves, your shares, your email open rate, your click rate, your unsubscribe rate, your website traffic, your bounce rate, and about forty other things before breakfast.
So you either go all in until it feels like a part-time job, or you give up entirely and run on gut feel.
Which works, sometimes. But that doesn’t feel like a great way to run a business. Gut feel is great for day-to-day decisions. But when you need to make a bigger call, like whether to invest more time in your email list, or whether that content you’ve been creating is actually bringing in clients, instinct alone won’t give you the answer.Â
That’s where tracking comes in. Not as a burden, but as a compass.
Your marketing isn't a straight line, so your tracking shouldn't be either
If you’ve read my post on why your marketing funnel isn’t working, you’ll know I think about marketing as circles rather than a funnel. People don’t move from A to B to C in a neat line. They discover you on Instagram, wander over to your website, join your email list, listen to your podcast for three months, and then buy. Or they find a blog post on Google, sign up for your freebie, and become a client within a week.Â
The journey is different every time. So the numbers you track need to reflect the whole picture, not just one channel.
The three things your numbers can tell you
There are really only three questions your marketing numbers need to answer.
Are people finding me? This is visibility. Are new people discovering you? Is your email list growing? Is your website getting traffic? These numbers tell you whether your marketing is reaching beyond the people who already know you.
Are people connecting with what I share? This is engagement. When people do find you, are they sticking around? Are they opening your emails, reading your blog posts, replying to your newsletters? High visibility with low engagement usually means your message isn’t landing the way you think it is.
Are people taking action? This is all about conversion. Are people downloading your freebie, booking a call, buying your offer? These are the numbers most directly connected to your actual business results.
Here’s what’s important: you need data across all three, always. Not because you need to obsess over all of them equally, but because they’re connected. If you only track visibility for three months and then wonder why sales are low, you have nothing to diagnose the problem with. Was it a visibility issue? An engagement issue? A conversion issue? You won’t know. A little data across all three areas, tracked consistently, lets you troubleshoot when something isn’t working.
What to actually track
If people track their marketing, this is where they usually overcomplicate it. You don’t need to track every number on every platform. Pick one or two things per area and leave the rest.
For your email marketing, your most useful numbers are your subscriber count and your open rate. That’s it for most businesses. If you’re actively trying to drive sales through email, add your click rate. Everything else, unsubscribe rate, spam rate, all of it is context, not something to check every week.
For social media, focus on follower growth over time and one engagement number, whichever feels most relevant to how you use the platform. That might be likes, comments, or shares depending on where you’re most active. You don’t need all of them.
For your website, look at how many people are visiting and where they’re coming from. Are they finding you through Google, through your email newsletters, through social media? That tells you which parts of your marketing are actually driving people to your corner of the internet. If you want to go a little deeper, look at which pages are getting the most traffic. That tells you what your audience actually cares about.
For conversions, track whatever action matters most to your business right now. Freebie downloads, discovery calls booked, sales. One or two numbers, not ten.
How to actually track it
To track your marketing, you don’t need a fancy tool. A simple Google Sheet or an Airtable base works perfectly. Create a row for each month, add your chosen numbers, and fill it in once a month. That’s the whole system.
Monthly is the right rhythm for most businesses. Checking more often than that means you’re reacting to noise rather than patterns. For some businesses, quarterly is even fine, especially if your work tends to come in seasons or project cycles.
Don’t forget to look at the data each time too and notice anything specific. Is your email subscriber number going down? Is your click rate up? Is your website traffic coming from Pinterest more now that you’re actively using that?
With all the options AI offers these days, you could take it a step further and use an AI tool to help you spot patterns in your data over time. Paste your numbers in and ask it what it notices. This works especially well once you’ve got six months or more of data and want to understand what’s driving changes.
The most important thing is consistency. The same numbers, tracked at the same interval, over time. That’s what turns data into something actually useful.
A word on vanity metrics
Some numbers feel good, but don’t tell you much. Follower count is the classic one. It goes up, you feel great. It stays flat, you feel deflated. But followers alone aren’t the whole story.
A small, engaged email list will almost always outperform a large, passive one. Someone with 500 subscribers who open every email and reply occasionally is in a much stronger position than someone with 10,000 subscribers who never open anything.
Numbers aren’t everything. Size isn’t everything. Steady growth does indicate that your visibility is working, so it’s worth keeping an eye on. But it’s context, not conclusion. Don’t let it be the number that drives your decisions.
The goal is better decisions, not better spreadsheets
Tracking your marketing isn’t about having impressive reports. It’s about having enough information to make confident decisions.
When something goes up, you want to understand why so you can do more of it. When something isn’t moving, you want to catch it early enough to change direction, rather than spending six more months on something that isn’t working.
Pick a small number of things to track. Check them monthly. Notice what changes. Let it inform what you do next.
That’s all this needs to be.
If you’re not yet clear on your marketing goals and focus, that’s actually the place to start before you think about tracking. My free Marketing Strategy Starter Kit helps you work out what your business needs from your marketing right now, so that you know what you’re actually measuring against.
Download it by filling in the form below.
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