Measure Business Growth By Looking At Where You Are Now
Are you ready to take your online business to the next level and watch some explosive growth unfold over the coming months? Great! But before you start to plot and plan what you want to do to make that happen, it’s important to stop and look at where you’re at right now. The best way to do this is to measure business growth.
Importance of Data To Measure Business Growth
Business planning for future success is all about data. You can work more efficiently and spend your time and money most effectively if you know exactly where you are starting from. By recording data, you can start to see what is working along with what is not working for your business right now. This data helps you to see trends that are playing out. It all starts with recording where you are at right now.
What Information Should You Record?
Let’s take a look at some of the things you want to record that will help you measure business growth. First though, you should decide how you want to record this information. You can write it down by hand in a notebook, open up a word document to do it digitally, or use a spreadsheet. I prefer a spreadsheet because I have the option to have it calculate fun additional information like weekly and monthly averages and even map it all out in graphics to help me get a clearer picture.
Traffic
To grow you need to expand your reach. That means getting more traffic, but also engaging the people that come to your site by encouraging them to click around and read more. Good things to keep track of are:
- Total visitors;
- Unique visitors; bounce rate; and
- Where the traffic is coming from.
All the above information can be obtained through Google Analytics.
List / Subscribers
Your next goal is always to get the people you drive to your site through traffic onto your email list. Here you will want to track the following:
- Conversion rates for each of your opt-in forms and pages;
- Total number of subscribers;
- Open rates for your emails;
- Unsubscribe rates for your emails.
As you start to collect and review this data regularly, you will get a much better picture of your subscribers and what they want and can tailor your content accordingly. I get the data for the above from two main sources:
- The first point regarding the conversion rates I get from a Landing Page Plugin on my WordPress Site;
- All the other points I get from my Autoresponder – miRespond.
Customers
Subscribers are great, customers are better. Start by keeping track of the following:
- How many total customers you have;
- How many purchases you get per day, week, and month.
Other good numbers to look at are:
- Total lifetime value of your average customer;
- repeat purchases from customers; and
- refund rates.
This information can be obtained from a good Accounting Package – I use miBooks because it is easy to use, I can quickly create new reports and it is great value.
Income & Expenses
Last but not least, you need to look at your bottom line. This is your typical accounting data. You want to keep track of the following:
- Income;
- Expenses;
- Overall profit.
I find it helpful to look at the profit for the month, but track my businesses income on a daily basis.
Check Your Numbers Regularly
Now that you know what initial data you should be looking at, make it a habit to check these numbers regularly. Doing this will help you see what is working, what is not working, and how much you are growing as you move through the coming months and years.
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