Basic Business Metrics – Stats I Check Obsessively
Answer something for me honestly now – Do you know your business metrics?
Do you know what makes you money? What works for your business? What’s bringing you leads, traffic, sales?
I know to some people this topic can feel overwhelming. I’ve worked with many clients who couldn’t even begin to imagine tracking statistics for their business because they’ve got way too many pokers in the fire!
I mean how do you track:
- Article Marketing
- Email Marketing
- Social Media (twitter, linked in, facebook, yada yada)
- Video Marketing
- Search Engine Optimization
- External Links
- Guest Blogging
- Affiliate Traffic
- and on and on and on……
I understand the overwhelm, the frustration and I’ve got something to say about it!
Basic Business Metrics Critical Question:
Why are you doing all of these things if you don’t know what’s working?!
Someone told you that you had to do email marketing, social media, article marketing, etc and so you tried to do them all. As Dr. Phil would say: “How’s that workin for ya?”
I’m serious: How is it working for you?
If you can’t answer then you don’t have a business.
I know that sounds harsh. Maybe it’s because I’ve been watching too much Dragon’s Den (or just the right about!) but you NEED to know where you are getting results and where you are wasting your time. If you don’t then you have a hobby, not a business.
Now that that’s out of the way I thought I’d share with you some of the metrics I track obsessively. Please note that these are the metrics that match my business needs and probably won’t be exactly what you’ll want to check for your business. I’m telling you them to give you a working example of what someone could and should check to determine and maximize profitability for their own business.
Marketers Mojo Business Metrics Checked Daily
Aweber
This is my email marketing system that allows me to send out automated messages as well as broadcasts. It houses my main list for Marketers Mojo as well as six other lists for my mini-courses.
Here are the stats I check for Aweber:
Number of signups – I’m constantly striving to increase my signups so I check the number and look for ways to increase it
Optin Conversion – Aweber has a very handy automatic statistic added that shows me a percentage conversion. This is a result of how many people viewed my opt-in form versus how many signed up. I check this and look for ways to improve.
Email Open Rates – When I sent out emails I can also track how many people have opened each email. This is important since I obviously want the maximum number of opens as possible. When I see a popular email with a high open rate, I rinse and repeat.
Awstats
Awstats is included with my Bluehost hosting account and allows me to get detailed statistics about my website visitors. There are a number of items I want to track here and check to optimize how I make money:
Number of Visitors – Everyone wants more visitors. I check this to see how I’m doing in the task of getting more people to my website.
Keyword Searches – I target certain keywords in my posts and the stats tell me how I’m doing with this and if I’m getting the searches from the words I’m targeting. Keywords also let me know how people are finding my site and what they are interested in – giving me a better idea of what to keep writing about.
Pages Visited – Knowing what pages my visitors spend their time on also lets me know what they are most interested in and allows me to start creating more content around those topics.
Referring Pages – Finding out what websites are sending me the traffic is important. Then I can go back and get more traffic from those sources.
Ezine Articles
I’ve been doing a lot more with article marketing lately and have been focusing my efforts on one of the most popular directories – EzineArticles.com. Here’s what I want to know from my stats there:
Article Views – An article with a lot of views means I’ve hit on a topic that many people are interested in and I should find more articles to write around that same topic.
Click Rate – This is now automatically calculated for you through the Ezine Articles system. The click rate lets me know that people are making their way back to my site through the article and bio. If it’s high then I look to repeat what I’ve done, if it’s low then I look to determine why and how I can fix it.
Affiliate Sales
I am an affiliate for a number of websites and what I like to do fairly often is go through the programs and see what sales have been made. Not all affiliate programs send you an email when you make a sale so I like to go through and keep an eye on what’s happening. The programs that are more profitable then I will continue to promote and the ones that are not I will drop.
Why Monitor Website & Marketing Statistics?
So why do I spend so much time watching the stats?
I’m on a simple mission to make more money from my marketing efforts. By monitoring what happens carefully I can make adjustments. I will put more energy behind what works to make it better and I will remove what doesn’t. Doing this on a continuous basis creates a smooth running, profitable business that eventually won’t need such stringent monitoring.
For now, I really enjoy checking the statistics and have no problems being ‘obsessed‘.
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