How to tell which post brings in customers

Last month a business owner told me her most-viewed reel had earned nothing: 120,000 views and not one sign-up. A plain carousel about prices, seen by far fewer people, brought in seven customers that month.

She knew because she had the numbers. Without them, she might have made more reels like the first and stopped making carousels. That can be an expensive mistake. Here is how to connect a post to a customer, which four numbers to track and what to do with the result.

Why likes mislead you

Instagram shows you views, likes, comments and saves. These are all numbers about attention, because that is what the algorithm considers important.

Attention and willingness to buy rarely go together. A funny reel is widely shown to people who don’t know you and don’t want anything. A carousel about your working methods or your prices is seen by a small group that really thinks about it. The first feels like success and the second brings sales.

As long as you only look at attention, you are systematically improving the wrong side of your content.

How to link a post to a customer

The idea is simple: give each post its own address to the same page. Then you know where every visitor came from.

Here is how: create a campaign link for each post or week, with a name you recognise, such as ‘reel prices 12 September’ or ‘carousel week 38’. Use that link in your bio or story. When someone visits, signs up or buys, the result is attached to that name.

In your figures you will then see the visitors, sign-ups, orders and revenue per campaign. A reel with a hundred thousand views and zero sign-ups sits there next to a carousel with eight hundred views and seven customers. That makes choosing your next post a lot less complicated.

For those who do not want a campaign link by post

That’s a lot of administration and it doesn’t have to be so detailed. One link per channel and per week is enough for most entrepreneurs. You will then see which channel is delivering and which week went well. With your own placement list you know enough.

The four numbers I keep track of

I look at four numbers once a week, in this order. Together they form the path from viewer to customer and for each number you know what you need to repair if something breaks down.

1. Visitors to your link page

How many people opened your page? If this is low while your views are high, then it is in your bio or in your call. Your content works and you don’t ask people clearly enough to click.

2. Sign-ups

How many of those visitors left their email addresses? If visitors come and no one registers, it is in your promise or in your form. Too vague, too many fields, or the form is on another page.

3. Orders

How many people bought something? This percentage is always lower than you hope and that is normal. If it does not move, look at your price, your explanation and whether someone can pay with iDEAL.

4. Revenue per channel

This is the number that makes the decisions. Here you can see that TikTok brings eighty percent of your visitors and twenty percent of your revenue, or vice versa.

What you do with the outcome

Measuring is half the battle. The other half is that you do something with it and that turns out to be the most difficult part in practice, because the figures often tell you that your favorite content does not yield anything.

Three decisions I see entrepreneurs making:

• Making more of what delivers. If your carousel about prices brought seven customers, then make three carousels about money in the coming month: what something costs, why, what someone gets in return.
• Use each channel differently. If a certain type of reel gets a lot of views without revenue, keep creating it to grow and sell through your list. Reach and revenue may come from different sources.
• Fix the page instead of the content. If there are enough visitors and nothing happens, then the problem lies behind the click. That can often be solved in an afternoon, as I describe in why your link in bio doesn’t yield anything.

What you can do with A/B testing

If you have enough visitors, you can put two versions of your page together: a different headline, a different price, a different image. Half of your visitors will see one, half the other and after a few weeks you will know which sells better.

Only start here if you get about a hundred visitors per week, because below that the difference is a coincidence. How it works is shown statistics and optimization.

A simple checklist to keep nearby

I keep it in a table with five columns: week, visitors, sign-ups, orders, revenue. One line per week, a year on one A4.

What you see that you miss in separate weeks is the line. A month in which your sign-ups double while your visitors remain the same means that your page improved. If sign-ups remain the same while your visitors double, you attracted a different type of audience.

Those two things require different answers and you can only tell them apart when you put the numbers next to each other. That’s why the table is more important than the dashboard: the dashboard shows you today, the table shows your direction.

Frequently asked questions

Can’t I do this with Google Analytics?

For visitors and clicks, yes. The difficult part is the link between a visitor and an order in euros, because for that you have to talk two systems together. If your link page, your form and your sales are in one environment, then that link is already there.

How long do I have to measure before I can say anything?

Four weeks for a first image and three months before you draw any conclusions about a channel. One good week means nothing, because one post can distort everything.

What if I have very few visitors?

‘Three sign-ups’ is a useful number to track. A percentage says less with such a small sample.

Do I also see which post someone brought who later bought?

Yes, if someone arrives through your campaign link and signs up or buys in the same flow. If they buy through your newsletter two months later, that sale will be attributed to the newsletter. Measurement is clearest close to the final step.

Is this included in the Free plan?

The Free plan gives you figures over thirty days. Campaign links with QR codes, A/B testing and the complete overview are included in the paid plans, from € 10 per month. See prices.