At the end of every year, I look back at my business stats and compare how my business did this year versus the previous year. This allows me to identify if my business is growing and meeting my goals or if I need to shift the plan for next year.
I encourage you to step back and review your business stats.
What stats to monitor and how?
The easiest way to monitor your stats is to set up a spreadsheet…I actually encourage you to do this monthly or quarterly, but for the example here we’ll just cover annual.
All right, I’ve opened up my tracking spreadsheet so I can share with you exactly what it is I monitor and you can use this as an example to identify what you should be monitoring.
Website visitors
I use google analytics to monitor how much traffic my website receives. The number I monitor are the unique “users” and not overall visits which could be repeat individuals….or myself.
List size
I use Ontraport for list management, so I collect the total number of subscribers on my list and compare to the number last year. I’ve kept stats since 2008, so I actually compare data over the past seven years and can also look at list growth rate. Is my list size increasing at a faster rate than previous years or about the same…or slower…not what I’d want to see.
Unsubscribes
I also look at total unsubscribe numbers from year to year. I don’t get too wrapped up in people unsubscribing. If you are doing adequate promotion of your services (you have to promote if you want to make any sales) you will have people unsubscribe. That being said, I like to have an idea if unsubscribe numbers are outside the norm and if there might be a particular reason why.