I know I know tracking seems such a boring topic. But you’ll be tracking for the rest of your entrepreneurial business life.
You’ll want to set up tracking for every area of your business. You can do it using the software you already have for each function. You need tracking to find out if your SEO works if email marketing is effective, and if your social media marketing campaigns are performing. If you want to know if that free checklist is generating real paying customers, you only need to look at the data to determine it. Let’s look at different types of data that you need to track and examples of each.
- Traffic Generation – Whether the traffic comes from organic traffic, paid traffic, or a specific traffic generating campaign that you perform, you should track it. Does this webinar generate traffic to your site? Is traffic converting? Understanding not only how you got the traffic, but whether it was productive traffic or not, will inform your marketing in many ways.
- Subscribes and Unsubscribes – How many people subscribed today, and where did they find your form? How many of those people made further purchases, or did other tag worthy behaviors? Knowing that information as well as when someone unsubscribes and what triggered it is essential to ensuring you improve your subscription rate as well as reduce your unsubs by developing more targeted information to attract your audience.
- Email Open Rates – You can test and track a lot about open rates for email messages. Does this subject line get the right people to open the email? When they do open it, are they answering your calls to action? How did the person get on your email list that makes them either easily converting or hard to convert?
- Click-Through Rates – When you post anything on social media, or you have clickable links in a blog post, you want to track click-through rates to find out if you’re doing a good enough job getting people to click through. Also, further than that, what happens once they click? Do they convert?
- Conversion Rates – Anytime you want to sell something, or you want your audience to take advantage of your call to action, this is a conversion. It doesn’t matter if it’s free or paid; the action you asked for is the conversion. Tracking whether your CTAs are working or not, is essential to your entire business.
- Revenue Generation – Tracking your revenues is the only way to understand your return on investment, cost per lead, and other aspects that you also need to track. This data will enable you to eventually more accurately estimate your earnings for each launch so that you can control your expenses better.
- Cost Per Lead – Do you know how much it cost you to get someone on your list? Tracking this metric is important because then you know how much you need to earn from your customers to cover the costs.
- Return on Investment (ROI) – How much you make after your total investment is the return on investment. The formula for return on investment is ROI = Net Income / Cost of Investment or ROI= Investment Gain/Investment Base. Knowing this number helps you avoid wasting money as you can compare your ROI to industry standards to see how you stack up.
- Engagement – While you can measure likes and so forth quickly enough, it’s more important to measure engagement, which is a little harder to do. However, technology is improving to enable you to tag your audience based on behavior, which can help you determine engagement.
- Lifetime Customer Value – If your ideal customer purchased every single product you sell, what would they pay over their lifetime, and how long would it take? Knowing this is a great way to encourage your affiliates to make more sales since telling them the potential is motivating.
The truth is that you should make a comprehensive list of what you will track when you set up your goals. A goal must be measurable, and when something is measurable, it’s trackable using the software and resources that you use to put that metric in play. Tracking these metrics will help you improve your business with every data point you collect.
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