NUMBERS THAT MATTER — METRICS MADE SIMPLE

📊 You don't need to track every number in your business. Learn the key metrics that can help you understand your sales, customers, website, marketing and profitability—and use those numbers to make better business decisions.

💰 Revenue vs Profit

Understand the difference between the money your business brings in and what remains after business expenses.

  • QuickBooks — Great for tracking revenue, expenses and profit in one place.

  • Xero — Great for accounting reports that help you understand business income and profitability.

📈 Profit Margin

Profit margin helps you understand how much of your sales revenue remains as profit after applicable costs and expenses.

  • QuickBooks — Great for tracking income, expenses and profitability.

  • SCORE — Great for free small-business financial education and mentoring.

🛒 Conversion Rate

Conversion rate measures the percentage of visitors who complete a desired action, such as making a purchase, signing up or submitting a form.

  • Google Analytics — Great for measuring website traffic, user behavior and important website actions.

  • Shopify — Great for monitoring online-store sales and e-commerce performance.

🧾 Average Order Value

Average Order Value (AOV) tells you approximately how much customers spend per order.

  • Shopify — Great for tracking orders, sales and e-commerce analytics.

  • Google Analytics — Useful for analyzing online customer and purchase behavior when properly configured.

🌐 Website Traffic

Track how many people visit your website, where they come from and what they do after arriving.

  • Google Analytics — Great for analyzing website visitors, traffic sources and user behavior.

  • Google Search Console — Great for understanding how your website performs in Google Search.

  • Semrush — Great for SEO, keyword and competitor traffic research.

📧 Email Open & Click Rates

Track how subscribers interact with your emails. Click rates can help show whether recipients are engaging with your offers, links and calls to action.

  • Mailchimp — Great for email campaigns, audience management and email performance reporting.

  • Klaviyo — Great for e-commerce email and SMS marketing analytics.

  • Kit — Great for creators and small businesses building and measuring an email audience.

🔄 Repeat Purchase Rate

Understand how many customers return and purchase from your business again.

  • Shopify — Great for tracking customers, orders and store performance.

  • Klaviyo — Great for customer segmentation, retention marketing and repeat-purchase campaigns.

💵 Customer Acquisition Cost

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) helps you understand approximately how much you spend to acquire a new customer.

  • HubSpot — Great for connecting marketing, sales and customer data.

  • Google Analytics — Useful for analyzing traffic and conversions from different marketing channels.

  • Shopify — Great for connecting customer and sales information for e-commerce businesses.

🏆 Best-Selling Products

Identify which products generate the most orders or revenue so you can make better inventory, marketing and product-development decisions.

  • Shopify — Great for tracking product sales and store performance.

  • Square — Great for businesses tracking product sales through point-of-sale and commerce tools.

🛍️ Abandoned Cart Rate

Monitor how often shoppers add products to their carts but leave before completing checkout.

  • Shopify — Great for e-commerce checkout, customer and store analytics.

  • Klaviyo — Great for creating automated abandoned-cart email and SMS campaigns.

  • Omnisend — Great for e-commerce abandoned-cart and marketing automation.

📣 Return on Ad Spend

Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) helps you compare advertising revenue with the amount spent on advertising.

  • Google Ads — Great for measuring performance from Google advertising campaigns.

  • Meta for Business — Great for managing and measuring Facebook and Instagram advertising.

  • Google Analytics — Useful for analyzing website conversions and marketing-channel performance.

🚫 Which Numbers to Ignore

Not every large number means your business is succeeding. Avoid focusing on vanity metrics without connecting them to meaningful business outcomes.

For example:

Followers without engagement
Website traffic without conversions
Likes without sales or leads
Email subscribers who never engage
Impressions without meaningful action

Instead, pay closer attention to numbers connected to your goals—such as profit, conversions, repeat customers, customer acquisition cost, average order value and sales.

  • Google Analytics — Great for looking beyond simple visitor counts and understanding what people actually do on your website.

  • HubSpot — Great for connecting marketing activity with leads, customers and sales.

  • SCORE — Great for free guidance on understanding and improving overall business performance.

⭐ START WITH THESE NUMBERS

If you're a new small-business owner, don't overwhelm yourself trying to monitor everything at once.

Start with:

1. Revenue — How much are you selling?
2. Expenses — How much are you spending?
3. Profit — How much is actually left?
4. Conversion Rate — Are visitors becoming customers?
5. Average Order Value — How much does the average order bring in?
6. Best-Selling Products — What are customers actually buying?
7. Repeat Customers — Are people coming back?

As your business grows, you can begin monitoring more advanced numbers such as CAC, ROAS, abandoned-cart rate and customer retention.