the goose

Adrian Mole might have have been on to something.  Measurement seems to be all the rage.  So why all the focus?

It comes down to this.  Growing our cashflow is basically a monotenous task.  We try out various things in an attempt to find new ways of growing our income.  New sales strategies, blogging, calling, networking are all thrown into the mix.  It is fun.  Finding out what works is fun.  The trick is – once you have found out what works, these tasks become boring.  The initial rush of blood with the first sales fade.  It is down to plain old repetition.

Repetitive tasks bore the bejesus out of me.  I prefer to call them habits.  Habits form the progress.  Successful bloggers post regularly.  Social-pop stars tweet regularly.  Fit people train regularly.  Smart people do the crossword etc.

The truth be told that most of the activities or habits we have that grow Piehole are not really web related.  With all that in mind I’ve put together this simple tool for tracking non-webby activities online.  You can see it in action at www.piehole.ie/event_stuffer/event_stuffer.html.  It is basically a form that lets us pump our own events into Google Analytics so we can track over time what we have been up to and what is working.

So why bother?

• I find it kind of motivating to see a spike in revenue that co-encides with a load of outbound customer service calls.
• We can design custom analytics reports showing correlation between marketing activity and site performance.
• Ideally, when it comes to selling Piehole, it will be a great sales tool to actually have a demonstration of what works in black and white.
• Over time we can really see which habits work and which are worth dumping.

So for now it is back to the grunt work (I mean habit forming).