So we are talking about metrics, measurements, and what do we do over the period of May. And I want to make sure, given the number of things you can track and measure, that you are actually tracking the the right thing.
Or the best thing. There are lots of right things but is it the best one?
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With things like google analytics, and then you’ve got page insights for Facebook, you’ve got your Pinterest metrics, you’ve got it for all your social media, and you’ve got your accounts, you’ve got sales figures, everything. So what is important? How do you decide what to measure?
Now this comes about because we have it over and over in my business. I run Fire Protection Online in the UK, which is a large fire safety business, and we do go out and about servicing, but we are kind of like an Amazon for fire safety gear.
So in customer services for example, my customer services staff are not tracked on how long they spend on average call because customer comes first.
We don’t care how long it takes. If that’s what the customer needs, that’s what the customer gets. But in other places it may be important to get people getting through the system as quickly as possible. It’s not for us.
But they will have other things that are significant for them. They need to measure at what time of the day to cause peak.
But that then feeds up to their customer services supervisor. When the customer service supervisor reports to the general manager, their general manager doesn’t need to know things like that.
When that general manager reports to me, I don’t need to know things like that. So there are bits that will effect parts of your business. But there are things that effect the bottom line.
The money, the profit, the business, the growth. Those are the key items right. The key measurements. But there are many. And a lot of people get caught up with numbers.
So for example, social media. Are you building up followers and so on? But I am sorry, now if anyone in the social media world is listening, you know this.
But I am going to apologize here, those numbers mean nothing. It is engagement, if anything. However engagement means nothing really, because these are method you get people on, or they should be a method to relate to people, to engage people to get people onto your website and then when they get onto your website, what do they do?
So you could of course measure the number of visitors to your website. Google analytics tracks that for you. But is that important?
If you get a hundred thousand visitors a day, is that important? It might be if you are selling advertising, and profound number of views.
But I am going to guess you are not. So what is important? How about getting them onto your list? Because the whole purpose of the website is to get them onto a list so that you can sell to them at a later date.
So do you track the number who signed up to your list? Well if you track that, then you have to track the number that unsubscribe.
But you have the total number of subscribers in your list manager. You can just grab that number once a month and stick it in a spreadsheet.
However what I would say to you is a best measurement, and example of the best measurement with all that is what percentage of people who visit your website opt in to your list?
Now that is a key measurement. Because it doesn’t matter how many are on the list. It’s the percentage of people who get to your website.
So if you know that, for example, let’s say 2.8% of people that visit your website, signup to your web, signup to your list.
You know then, and if you then have separate metric of how many of them convert customers who are on your list, You can then know how much you could spend to get more visitors to your website because percentage of signup and then become a customer and so on.
That’s the way you need to be thinking about the numbers. It’s the significance of what they do to the bottom-line. And the number of twitter followers is not going to tell you that.
It’s what happens afterwards. What do they do later? So that 2.8%, you can then do other things. You can change the option, put in different position, change the color, change the message, and change the button. All that sort of thing to try and get that to 2.9% to 3% to 3.1. And so on.
And then, so if you track that 2.8% on a spreadsheet, and you’ve got it month by month by month. If you started today or the end of May, then end of June, end of whatever. you think it’s not going to help me now.
But I can guarantee you are planning to be in business for quite a while. In 12 months, in 24 months, in 36 months, when you look back you will see patterns. You will see dips, you will see peaks, you will see troughs.
When you are predicting things in the future, when you are predicting cash flow and things like financial forecast, you then have data to base it on true true figures and then you have annual inflections and you have trends and things like that. Do you see where this is going? Yeah.
So we track information on our, we are a sales thing so we operate Monday to Friday, people buy all the time.
But we consider the buying days the actual business days. Some days we’ll have 20 days. Some months, sorry, will have 20 days. Other months will have 22 days.
So if we’re doing a forecast, we can base it, we’ve got all that data, we know we can base future forecasts on the past but we know that month had two extra days because we tracked it by the days, and so on. And we can make accurate forecasts. Our forecasts are pretty good actually.
But I want you to think of what’s significant and what’s the best thing to measure. I want to send you to a book, Gary Keller’s The One Thing.
That says, what is a figure that will effect what we do this month. That will effect what we do this quarter. That will effect what we do this year, that will affect what we do in 5 years. Think of it like that. What is going to affect our targets and goals? Okay.
So when you are measuring things, you don’t need to measure a lot. You need to pick some key metrics that will affect your bottom line.
If you are in, if you do any sales visits, what percentage of people do you visit, convert to customers? Really simple. See how important that will be. Better than Facebook fans eh? Hmm. Anyway that is it.
Monday Book Recommendation
Today is Monday and that means it is time for a book for the week. This week I am going to recommend a book by a gentleman called Cal Newport.
And it’s ‘So Good They Can’t Ignore You’. So Good They Can’t Ignore You.
Do I need to explain what it’s going to be about? I don’t think so.
I’ll leave it in your capable hands. I’ll be back with you tomorrow.
