How to Tell If Your Marketing Is Working (The Numbers That Matter for Your Practice)

You post. You email. Maybe you've run an ad or two. And then you wait, hoping something sticks.

Maybe it does. Maybe it doesn't. And because you can't quite tell which, you do more. More posts, more emails, a new freebie, a different platform. The work piles up and the answer stays just out of reach.

Do you recognise this? That restless, slightly guilty feeling of being busy without knowing whether any of it is actually bringing people to your door?

I've been there. And I want to show you a way out of it that doesn't involve drowning in spreadsheets or hiring a data analyst.

The answer is to count a few things, the right way, once a month.

Why Does Doing More Feel Like the Answer When You Can't See What's Working?

Because effort feels like control.

When the numbers are invisible, the only thing you can think to do is add more. More content, more platforms, more hours. It makes sense, in a way. You're a skilled practitioner. You know that showing up matters. So you keep showing up, everywhere, hoping something lands.

But effort without information is really just hope. And hope is exhausting to sustain.

The thing is, you probably don't need to do more. You need to see what's already working, so you can do more of that, and stop doing the rest.

That's what a handful of numbers can do for you.

Which Numbers Actually Matter for a Therapy Practice or Coaching Business?

Not many. That's the good news.

Here's a short list of the numbers worth paying attention to, in plain language:

• Real people visiting your website. Not page views. One person reloading your page five times in an afternoon is still one person. People matter; page views flatter.
• Your sign-up rate, page by page. Of every 100 people who land on your free gift page, how many actually sign up? And if you have more than one free gift page, look at each one separately. Two pages almost never do the same job.
• Clicks to book a call, and how many of those become bookings. These two numbers together tell you whether your offer is landing, and whether your booking process is getting in the way.
• Email clicks, not just opens. More on this in a moment, but clicks are the number that tells you whether your email actually moved someone.
• Where the people who became clients first came from. Not where they found you last week. Where did they start?

That last one is the one most practitioners never think to check. And it's often the most useful of all.

Why Do Email Open Rates Lie to You?

This one catches people out, and it's worth understanding.

Some email inboxes, Apple Mail in particular, automatically "open" every email the moment it arrives, whether or not the person actually reads a word. So your open rate can look impressively high while your emails are sitting completely unread.

Clicks are different. A click means a real person made a decision. They read something, they were interested, and they acted. That's the number worth watching.

If you're curious about what makes people actually click in an email, I've written more about that in The 5 Biggest Mistakes Coaches Make With Email Marketing. It's worth a read if email is part of how you stay in touch with people.

In What Three Ways Can Your Numbers Mislead You?

Even when you're tracking, the numbers can lie. Here are the three most common ways, and how to spot each one.

Your own visits. Every time you check your own website, you count as a visitor. Every time you click a link in your own email, you count as a click. This sounds obvious until you realise how often you visit your own pages, especially when you're tweaking something or checking it looks right. The fix is to filter out your own computer in your analytics, or at least to keep it in mind when something looks unusually busy.

I found this out the hard way. When I read my own October report, I noticed that an email I'd sent back in March was showing up as active in Google Analytics. When I looked closer, every single visit it appeared to be generating was coming from one desktop computer in Sydney. My own. Google Analytics had credited my own later visits to the last email link I'd clicked. That's a good example of why I count people, not visits, and why I always check where activity is actually coming from.

Test sign-ups. When you test your own sign-up form, which you absolutely should do, you count as a sign-up. So if you've tested it a few times, your sign-up rate for that page looks better than it is. Worth deleting your own test entries from your email list so they don't skew the picture.

Automated crawlers. These are bots that visit websites automatically, often from countries you'd never work with, staying for a second or two and looking at one page before disappearing. They're not people. They're not potential clients. If you're seeing a lot of very short visits from places that make no sense for your practice, that's likely what you're looking at. Count only visitors from the countries you actually serve.

What Did Tracking Actually Show Me in My Own Practice?

In the first month of tracking a Facebook ad campaign for one of my free gift offers, the numbers showed that 84 new people had joined my email list through that ad. That was useful to know.

More useful was this: I had two sign-up pages running, and they weren't doing the same job at all. One was turning about 36 in every 100 visitors into sign-ups. The other, about 23 in every 100. Without tracking, I'd have treated them as identical. With it, I knew exactly which one to look at and why.

And one of those 84 people, some time later, clicked through from one of my emails and bought one of my programmes. We'd never spoken. The ad started it, and an email finished it. I only know that because both were tracked.

That's the thing about this kind of information. It doesn't just tell you what happened. It tells you what's worth doing again.

What's the Simplest Monthly Habit for Keeping an Eye on Your Marketing?

Once a month, over a cup of tea, look at the same few numbers. Compare them with last month. Choose one thing to do more of, and one thing to fix or test differently. That's it.

You're not looking for perfection. You're looking for direction. A small, consistent habit like this will tell you more over six months than any amount of frantic activity ever could.

If you're not sure which part of your marketing to look at first, the free Client Attraction Score is a good place to start. It takes a couple of minutes and helps you see where the gaps are most likely to be.

What If I Have No Tracking Set Up at All?

Then you're in good company. Many practitioners I speak with either have no tracking in place, or they had Google Analytics installed by whoever built their website and have never actually opened it. That's completely fine, and it's not a reason to feel behind.

The place to start is Google Analytics 4, which is free. If it's already installed on your site, you may just need to log in and have a look around. If it's not, it can usually be added without rebuilding anything.

The trickier part, and the part where most people give up, is knowing what to look at once you're in there. Google Analytics can show you an enormous amount of information, most of which isn't relevant to a small practice. The skill is in knowing which numbers to pull out and what they're actually telling you.

I spent years as Head of IT at Unilever before I became a counsellor and copywriter, so the technical side of this doesn't intimidate me. I know it intimidates most people, and I know exactly why. The tools were simply never designed with a solo practitioner in mind.

If you're building your practice on email rather than social media, it's also worth thinking about why owning your list matters so much in the first place. I've written about that in How to Get Coaching Clients Without Social Media, and the tracking piece fits neatly into that picture.

Frequently Asked Questions

What's a good sign-up rate for a free gift page?

It varies quite a bit depending on where your visitors are coming from, what you're offering, and how well the page speaks to the people landing on it. Rather than chasing an industry average, the more useful question is how your own pages compare with each other, and whether each one is improving month on month. Your pages, measured against themselves over time, will tell you far more than any benchmark ever could.

Do I need Google Analytics?

It's the most practical free option for a small practice, yes. Most people find it's already on their site and simply hasn't been opened.

Why are my email open rates so high?

Most likely because some of the people on your list use Apple Mail, which automatically registers an email as "opened" the moment it arrives, regardless of whether anyone actually reads it. This inflates open rates across the board and makes them an unreliable measure of engagement. Clicks are a much more reliable signal of whether your email actually did anything.

How often should I check my numbers?

Once a month is enough for most practitioners, and checking more often than that can actually work against you. Marketing rarely changes meaningfully from week to week, and watching numbers too frequently tends to produce anxiety rather than insight. A monthly rhythm gives you enough data to see a real pattern, and enough distance to respond calmly rather than react. Pick a day, make a cup of tea, look at the same few numbers each time, and note what's shifted. That's a habit you can actually keep.