Tracking Your Business Success

I’ve heard it said many times you can’t change what you do not measure. I take that to mean if you don’t know where you started, you have no idea if you are improving or doing worse.

This is important in life and in your business.  In life, if we start gaining weight it’s generally obvious but we still weigh ourselves so that when we loose a pound we feel a bit better and celebrate the victory.  

In our every  day life we  HAVE to measure  and track things because  you really can’t build a house or assemble  a car or even bake a cake without some sort of measurement.

The same should be true in our business. Sure you can look at your bank account and see you still have money or you have more money in there this month than last. But as we all know that is NOT a good measurement of success.

Just because the bank shows a balance doesn’t mean all transactions have cleared or maybe you have a bigger balance, but do you really? Did you take into account that maybe you spent more on advertising or extra on labor? You need measurements in place to see where you can improve.

Here are a few spots you can measure to help improve your online success. In each step I’ll give an explanation, and where possible, the tools I use to measure and why.

The first is your website stats. For this you can either use Google Analytics or the stats provided with your web hosting. Many people are not aware that your hosting account usually can show web stats. The most common is software called AW Stats.

You can verify this by logging into your control panel and look for that name.

The first thing I check for in my stats are the number of visitors for the month. It’s good to compare with the previous months and of course compare with where you were during this month the previous year.

While this will help you see if you are getting more or less visitors, you can also start to see trends. Are some months better then others? Maybe your business is seasonal and you people tend to buy your products or services during certain times of the year.

Maybe there are slow points in your stats and you can look back and see you were not doing promotions during those times or other things that generate traffic to your site.

While you are looking at visitor stats, go ahead and check out daily stats, as well. Are there days that preform better than others — maybe even hours that you get more traffic than others?

Something else I like to look at in the stats are the keywords people used to find or get to my site. Generally the stats will show you single word and keyword phrases that were entered into search engines and your site was chosen in the results.

It is helpful to see what words you are being found for mainly for the fact you can see what topics people are interested in for what you are offering. If you are getting hits on key blog posts with that topic think about offering a product for it. This is a great way to see the pulse of your website visitors.

There is a lot more information you can find with your stats such as the devices people are using to view your site, what browsers they are using and even display sizes they are viewing your site at. This again is helpful, as you will want to be sure your site works and looks good in those top devices or browsers.

Another area I like to keep track of stats on is link tracking. Generally when I create a link for a website, email, blog post etc., I try to use link tracking software so that I can see what links are getting clicked on.

This allows me to see if a blog post hit target with someone and they clicked a link in the post to resource I was discussing. Or on my products page I can see if someone visited that page and clicked on a product there. If a product is showing interest but not converting to sales, I know I need to possibly change up the sales page.

Also if the link on the product page isn’t getting clicked then I might need to better describe the product or possibly change how the product is displayed. The product I like to use for this is LinkTrackr. I’ve been using it for years and I’ve not found anything that does the job as well.

In my emails the service I use automatically tracks the links for me, which comes in handy. That service is Sender. info. I try when writing a promotional email to have three links to the product or offer. By tracking the links I can see if it was link one, two or three in the email that converted.

This is just another way to monitor and see what is working and what is not.

Now with all of this talk about tracking and checking stats, I want to be sure to tell you it is more important to get something up, then go back and add the tracking or analytics or what ever system you plan on using for measuring your business success.

If you take a peek at my products page you will see that there are many products listed. I can guarantee that I did not add the tracking links as I put the products up the first time. I added the tracking as time allowed. And just like the email service I use, if you can find resources that automate the process that is always a good idea and best use of your time.