Four Numbers Worth Tracking Every Month

Most small businesses track followers.

Not because followers matter especially — because it’s the number the app puts on the screen when you open it. It’s right there, it goes up, and it feels like progress.

It’s a fine number to know and a poor number to run on. Followers can climb in a month where nothing sold, and sit flat through your best month of the year. If it’s the only thing you write down, you’ll end up with a year of data that can’t answer a single useful question.

Here are four instead.

1. Followers

Keep it. Just demote it.

Followers are a leading indicator — they tell you whether more people are becoming aware of you, which usually comes before more people buying from you, sometimes by months. On its own it means very little. Next to the other three it starts to earn its place.

Record the raw number per platform, monthly. Daily is noise.

2. Sales

The number your business actually runs on, and the one that almost never appears in a social media tool.

You don’t need attribution. You’re not going to prove which post caused which sale, and anything claiming otherwise at your size is guessing with more confidence than the data supports. What you need is the number sitting on the same page as everything else, month by month, so you can see the shape.

Use whatever definition fits — revenue, orders, bookings, jobs quoted. Consistency matters more than precision. The same imperfect definition every month tells you far more than a perfect one you change halfway through.

3. Sign-ups

Whatever “someone raised their hand” means for you: newsletter subscribers, enquiry forms, quote requests, booking requests, trial starts.

The most underrated of the four, because it’s the bridge. Followers are attention. Sales are money. Sign-ups are the thing in between — and it’s the number that moves first when your marketing starts working.

4. Ratings

Google reviews, platform ratings, whatever public score your business carries. Record the score and the number of reviews, because a 4.5 from 40 people means something a 4.5 from 4 doesn’t.

Two reasons it belongs. For a lot of local businesses it influences buying decisions more than every social post combined. And it’s slow, which makes it a good honesty check.

The fifth one, if you can get it: clicks per platform

Four numbers is the habit. If you can add a fifth, make it this one, because it answers a question the others can’t: which platform is doing the work?

Post the same thing to Instagram, LinkedIn and a local Facebook group, and your website analytics gives you one lump of traffic. You know people came. You don’t know from where, so you keep doing all three at equal effort, forever.

The fix is embarrassingly simple: use a different link for each platform. Most link shorteners will make you free ones. Instagram gets link A, LinkedIn link B, the Facebook group link C — all pointing at the same page. Then compare the clicks at the end of the month.

What they tell you together

The value isn’t in any single number. It’s in the pattern — and the pattern only shows up once you’ve got a few months of them side by side.

Here’s a plant nursery, four months in:

Four things are visible there that no single number would have shown:

Followers grew 37% and sales didn’t move for three months. Follower growth is not the mechanism. If she’d only tracked followers she’d have concluded things were going well for a quarter in which they weren’t.

Sign-ups jumped in May and sales followed in the same month. That’s the lever. Sign-ups are what to watch and what to try to move — not followers.

The Facebook group sends five times the clicks of Instagram, despite Instagram having most of the followers and almost all of the effort. That single row is worth more than the rest of the table, because it tells her where next month’s hour should go.

LinkedIn sent nine people in three months. She can stop. Not “post less on LinkedIn” — stop, and put the time into the group.

And the patterns generalise:

• Followers up, sign-ups flat → you’re reaching the wrong people
• Sign-ups up, sales flat → the problem is after the enquiry, not before it
• Everything flat, ratings up → serving existing customers well, acquiring nobody
• Everything flat → a normal month

That last one matters most. The main damage bad measurement does isn’t missed opportunity — it’s panic. People rebuild their entire marketing approach because of one quiet month that was, statistically, a Tuesday. Most months are flat. Four numbers over two years shows you that, and it’s oddly calming.

The habit

First Monday of the month. Fifteen minutes. Four numbers, written in the same place as last month’s.

That’s it, and the habit is worth more than the sophistication. A business with two years of four crude numbers recorded consistently can see its own seasonality, notice a slide in month two instead of month six, and answer “is this working?” without a meeting. A business with a beautiful analytics dashboard it opens twice a year cannot.

Two things that make it stick. Put it in the calendar as a specific day, not “monthly” — a frequency is a wish, a date is an appointment. And write it somewhere permanent, because the whole value is in the comparison. A number on its own is trivia.

Start this month

1. Open a spreadsheet. Four columns, twelve rows.
2. Fill in this month’s numbers, however roughly.
3. Put “check the numbers” in your calendar for the first Monday of next month.
4. Make a free short link for each platform you post to, ready for next month’s fifth column.

You’ll have something useful in three months and something genuinely valuable in a year. And unlike almost everything else in marketing, it works whether or not you’re any good at it yet.

Promo keeps these four in one place and counts the per-platform clicks for you, since it hands you a different link each time you post — but a spreadsheet and a free link shortener will do the job, and if that’s where you start, good.