You can’t manage your home improvement marketing efforts without numbers. Numbers tell you whether you succeeded, but they also help you succeed.

Consider the example of losing or gaining weight. At minimum, you have to know how much you weigh now so you can compare it with a future number to know if you met your goal. With marketing, you have to know how well your business is doing now so you can determine if marketing efforts are helping you improve.

Typically, people who are trying to change their weight also count calories, nutrients, and exercise. When you’re crunching the numbers to figure out how much you can eat and how many minutes you should walk or exercise to meet a weight goal, you’re engaging in analytics.

You can also engage in analytics to better understand how to improve your home improvement marketing efforts. Let’s look at some basic concepts of marketing analytics using the weight loss metaphor as a guide.

• Know where you are. In weight loss, it means how much you weigh now. In marketing, it means understanding what your revenue and sales numbers are, how much traffic your site is currently getting, and how many of your leads are converting.
• Know where you want to be. In weight loss, this is your target weight. In marketing, it’s the business-centric goal (not a marketing-centric goal). Common goals might be to increase revenue or sales or create awareness for a new product line.
• Choose a path. For weight loss, you might decide to eat 1,500 calories a day and exercise three times each week. For marketing, you might decide to publish a blog post and three social posts every week as well as run an ad campaign based on a certain keyword.
• Capture numbers. During a weight loss journey, you might capture numbers including your weight, calories eaten daily, intensity and length of workouts, and measurements of your waist. You have to capture numbers to evaluate marketing efforts too. They might include the dates and times you post, how long your posts are, how much traffic your pages get, how many people click ads or links, and how many leads become conversions.
• Evaluate and make changes. If you haven’t lost weight—or you’re gaining it—after a month, you’re probably going to make changes such as eating less calories or working out more. The same should happen if your business goals aren’t being positively impacted by your marketing efforts. If site traffic and conversions aren’t increasing, you might change when you post or alter the type of content you’re creating. You could also change the keywords you’re concentrating on or create longer content that answers searcher intent more completely.

What you change in your marketing strategy depends on your business goals and the data you collect. If you’re not sure how to evaluate your home improvement marketing efforts and improve them, consider working with an experienced marketing firm that can handle analytics, content generation, and ad efforts for you.