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As a self-employed professional or small business owner, time is your most valuable resource. It can be tough to juggle business with life and create balance. The best way to make the most of your time is to implement metrics. Metrics will allow you to measure results of your actions so that you can better manage your available time.
Below, I have provided a list of key metrics that I urge all my clients to track. Any metric you track should be easy and quick to compile and review. Be sure to check your metrics weekly, this lets you know very quickly when something is awry and keeps you from getting to far of your business success roadmap. This is a good task to give to your virtual assistant, if you employ one. You should be able to compile and review this material in about 15 minutes a week.
Website Metrics:
(My favorite – Google Analytics Its free!)
- Metric: Keywords used to find your site.
- Why its important: This lets you know if the keywords you are using in your articles and blog posts are pulling the right kinds of traffic to your site, and it lets you identify topics that are trending upward.
- Metric: Your current website traffic in relation to last week and last month.
- Why its important: This gives you a sense of how your efforts are unfolding over time. If you are getting a lot of new visitors this week or this month, then it means you are on the right track.
- Metric: The percentage of visitors to your site who sign up for your mailing list or newsletter.
- Why its important: This tells you whether or not your call-to-action to sign up is effective or is in need of tweaking. It may also give you ideas for how to play with your layout. (In other words, does moving the sign up box up, down, left or right effect the subscription rate? You might be surprised)
- Metric: The number of repeat visitors to your site.
- Why its important: If you have many people who return to your site repeatedly, it means that people view your content as high-quality and relevant.
- Metric: The dollar value of every visitor to your site (i.e., the value of sales divided by the number of unique visitors).
- Why its important: It keeps you from spending more per visitor than you can earn.
- Metric: The number of people who became clients, or bought something.
- Why its important: This tells you your conversion rate (the percentage of your visitors who purchased something), and it lets you play with your marketing tactics to find ways to raise your conversion rate.
Newsletter metrics:
(My favorite – AWeber for its metrics)
- Metric: The percentage of people who looked at your newsletter.
- Why its important: This tells you whether or not your subject line is compelling, which subject lines seem to do better, and which do not work at all. If your subject line isnt compelling, no one is going to open to newsletter to read it.
- Metric: The percentage of people who followed the call-to-action in your newsletter.
- Why its important: It tells you which calls to action are effective and which need work.
Marketing campaign metrics:
- Metric: How your leads are generated which of your marketing techniques pull clients to you?
- Why its important: It lets you focus on the marketing techniques that are most effective for drawing in new customers.
- Metric: Which marketing technique drew in the best-converting leads, and which were most profitable?
- Why its important: This lets you focus on the most profitable marketing techniques and set aside the ones that do not earn as much.
- Metric: What are the results of your marketing leads? Do the people download reports? Do they purchase something? Do they become clients?
- Why its important: This gives you a clearer idea of what your target market is most interested in and what they are reluctant to do.
