Every business needs data. If you think you're different you're wrong. Whether you are selling cupcakes, socks, strategy, advertising, cars or anything in between you need to know things about your business.What do I mean by "data"? Basic information that your business generates around core product or services. Information like this: How many customers do you have? How many return every day? What's the average size of their transactions? How many people do they tell about your product?These things can help you understand your business better and ensure that you have a good grasp on the parts of your business that you can improve upon or can be satisfied with.The complicated part is know what data you need. What things do you need to know to make things better or find what's broken? Here are some questions to ask and things to think about when considering what to track and why:

What is important to you and your business

Is it your customers, the number of sales, the time of day? What exactly matters to you? What's on the decline or on the up and why?

Constantly challenge what you think is important

Things change. Sometimes what was important to your business last year isn't important (or as important) now. Constantly reassess your requirements.

Ignore vanity

This is simple on the surface but it's tough to execute. Forget about your ego and then try to assess what matters to your business. It's not about how many new users you have; it's about how many of those new users return to your service and become life long customers. The Vanity metric there is "New Users", the relevant metric is "Returning Users". Drop the ego.

Don't lose data by being unprepared

When you launch a new product it can be exciting and overwhelming. But that's no reason to forget to track things. If you wake up 6 months in and realised that you didn't record any information then you'll never be able to get it back. It's gone forever. So plan from day one to record things.

Actually listen to the data

Don't simply track things, listen to what the data is telling you and actually execute changes to improve the situation. You may have thought that product X would sell but the data suggests product Y is selling better. You need to shift and emphasise product Y so you sell more, or angle marketing back to X and figure out why it isn't selling. React. Quickly.

Build graphs and keep up to date but don't obsess

When I worked at Vodacom we received an email once a day about user growth on our products. This was good to begin with but ultimately lead to me obsessing over numbers and tiny incremental shifts that I had very little control over. Let the data guide your bigger picture not create an OCD issue in your business.

If you aren't tracking it, it's hard to get better at it

Try to do things that are quantifiable and comparable. If you can quantify and compare you then can improve. The truth is that many business people are scared to track things because deep down they know that the truth which will be revealed may kill their business or product. You need to overcome this fear. If you believe in your business, product or service then the data can only help you improve if you're willing to listed.