the goose

There is a fatal flaw in Google analytics for anyone running an online business today.  The flaw is it only allows you to measure the amount of traffic on your site, perhaps your income, and your ad spend.  This is no big suprise, Google makes their money from your ad spend.  However, Adwords is likely to be only part or none of your marketing spend.  We actually don’t use it at all.

What Analytics does show however is that there is a lot of power in visualising your statistics.  As many bloggers will tell you, the coloured graphs help to keep the motivation up on those long cold lonely nights when you think no-one really cares.

Much the same goes for building your online cash-flow.  Sometimes it is hard to see the wood for the trees and having up to date accurate info helps to keep going through the dark times.

That is why I’ve mocked up what I think are the key metrics I’d like to see in my own dream analytics account.

At the top I’ve put outbound and inbound emails and calls.  I’ve got a hunch that these two metrics most closely predict our income in any given month.  In fact I know that getting on the phone is the single most effective thing I can do to drum up income.  On the other hand, it is an aversive task.  Clearly being able to see how calling impacts on revenue helps to get stuck in and start chatting to people.

400 people €25 a month

Further down the page blog posts, tweets and inbound links are also measured.  I know they have a secondary impact on sales but they help to make sure that we’re doing enough to market ourselves to voiceovers and more importantly, the advertising agencies that we promise to get the attention of.

Up front and center (or to the left) is the average income and total income.  Purely by seeing these figures every day, its motivates towards growing them.  What gets measured gets done and purely by pulling my attention towards the actual amount of income made this month, every month, I’m convinced I’ll improve the figure.  My personal target is 400 people paying €25 a month and any activities which distract from this only get in the way.

At the bottom is my task list.  All these stats are great but it is activities which drive sales.  Having to scroll down past by my own performance each day would be a powerful reminder of why you have to make that nth follow up call to someone who really isn’t all that nice to deal with in the first place .