Every business measures.
Clicks, enquiries, revenue per channel.
The dashboards are full.
And every week someone reads something different into them.
The number is rarely the problem.
Nobody set beforehand what it should mean.
Then it gets read to suit.
The channel works because clicks are rising.
The campaign works because revenue rose. In the same month the prices rose.
Numbers answer every question.
The wrong one too.
Measuring starts before the measuring.
First the decision on what should count:
Which offer should grow?
What is a good customer?
At what point is a channel just keeping people busy?
Then the number.
It confirms or refutes.
It doesn’t explain.
If what counts is set beforehand, the monthly meeting gets short.
The number says yes or no.
And the budget follows.
One rule often gets lost in daily work:
Where the measurement is broken, there is no verdict.
An account whose tracking double-counts delivers no number that means anything.
Whoever decides anyway decides on sand.
A number without a prior decision is an opinion with decimal places.