The metrics that matter are the ones that impact your core business objectives. I come from the world of politics, and a political organization has one purpose, which is to acquire voters.

Over time, and because elections are always the same in terms of moving parts (there are parties, candidates, voters, votes, et cetera) we understand some of the leading indicators of voting intent and can attack these metrics. Fundraising is a good one. Someone who gives you money is almost certainly going to vote for you. It also has the virtue of being something we can easily measure and track over time. If this weren’t the case, we would have a difficult time growing donations, or at least detecting which of our efforts were successful in doing so.

The other nice thing about focusing on fundraising is that the leading indicators of donor behaviour are also relatively well-known. A campaign is much more likely to convert someone into a donor if they have their email address. I suspect this is true for more than the obvious reason that it facilitates communication. Taking the first step is challenging, and getting someone over that hurdle of opting-in to something is important.

This process applies elsewhere.

You see how we have broken down the obviously important metrics to smaller, actionable metrics. I think this is a process for finding metrics that matter in a lot of different scenarios. Just like a political organization seeks votes, a private sector organization seeks revenue.

But the revenue bucket is being filled with many different hoses. This is one reason why businesses can get easily distracted by new technologies and services of questionable value. Maybe you can connect the dots between a Twitter follower and the revenue bucket, but there are probably a lot of steps in between that need work first, and a lot of bigger wins to be had before you demand A Twitter Strategy.

The temptation to start and end by looking at the revenue bucket is understandable because that’s where the money is pooling, but the real value comes in looking at the hoses. Which are the biggest and which contribute most to filling up the bucket? And which have the potential to contribute the most, but have blockages?

This may help make sense of the metaphor: the revenue bucket of an e-commerce site is filled when people buy things. So one leading indicator of whether or not people will buy things is probably the rate at which people abandon the purchasing funnel at the checkout stage. This would be the place to focus your energies first. The question should be what can we do to prevent people from abandoning at the checkout stage? rather than how can we get more people to the checkout stage?

Once you’ve solved this problem (you’re at the point where you’re getting diminished returns on any work you put into it is, I think, a fair indication of something being ‘solved’), then you move one step down the chain. What factors determine whether or not someone will get to the checkout point in the purchasing funnel? Rinse and repeat.

You should see how far away questions about getting new Twitter followers now seem. But my suspicion is there are a lot more social community managers than there are growth hackers/online marketers. Maybe this is a problem of education — more likely it’s a problem of choosing easy over effective.

This essay originally appeared on HackGrow.com