A few years ago, I was reviewing a marketing report with a client when they pointed at a number on the screen and asked whether it was good.
I can’t remember what the number was anymore. It might have been impressions. It might have been clicks. It might have been engagement. Whatever it was, the answer was probably yes.
The number looked impressive.
The problem was that it didn’t really tell us anything.
That sounds strange coming from someone who has spent most of her career around marketing, but the longer I’ve been in business, the more cautious I’ve become about numbers that make us feel informed without actually helping us make better decisions.
I still remember the early days when digital marketing became more sophisticated and suddenly everything could be measured. It felt revolutionary. We had dashboards, reports, charts and graphs for almost every activity. For the first time, we could see what people were clicking, reading, watching and engaging with.
The assumption was that more data would automatically lead to better decisions.
Sometimes it did.
Sometimes it simply gave us more things to look at.
One of the things I’ve noticed over the years is that business owners often become attached to metrics that make them feel successful rather than metrics that help them understand reality.
I’m not judging that. I’ve done it myself.
There’s something comforting about opening a report and seeing a number move in the right direction. More followers. More traffic. More views. More engagement.
The problem is that growth in those numbers doesn’t always translate into growth in the business.
Some of the most successful businesses I’ve worked with had remarkably boring reports.
Nothing looked particularly exciting. No viral campaigns. No explosive growth charts. No record-breaking engagement.
What they did have was a steady flow of enquiries, strong customer retention, healthy margins and predictable revenue.
At some point I realised that the metrics I cared about as a marketer and the metrics I cared about as a business owner were becoming very different things.
As a business owner, I find myself asking simpler questions.
Are customers coming back?
Are they telling other people about us?
Are we solving a problem people genuinely value?
Is the business becoming stronger, more resilient and more predictable over time?
Those questions don’t always fit neatly into a dashboard.
In fact, some of the most important indicators in a business are surprisingly difficult to measure.
Trust is difficult to measure. Reputation is difficult to measure. Customer loyalty is difficult to measure. The quality of relationships you’ve built over a decade is difficult to measure.
Yet those things often end up determining the long-term success of a business far more than a spike in website traffic ever will.
I think that’s one of the reasons I’ve become less interested in individual metrics and more interested in patterns.
One month’s data rarely tells a meaningful story.
One quarter sometimes doesn’t either.
But patterns do.
Patterns reveal whether customers are becoming more loyal. They reveal whether marketing is creating awareness that eventually turns into revenue. They reveal whether a business is moving in the right direction, even when progress feels slower than we’d like.
The older I get, the more I appreciate numbers that help me understand reality rather than numbers that simply make me feel good.
That’s true in business. It’s true in investing. It’s true in health. It’s probably true in life generally.
The best metrics don’t exist to validate our assumptions. They exist to challenge them.
And maybe that’s why the marketing reports I value most today look very different from the ones I valued ten years ago.
Back then, I was fascinated by what could be measured. Today, I’m more interested in what actually matters.
They’re not always the same thing.