Have you got a handle on the numbers needed to make your business a success?
And no, we are not talking about your financial figures here – that’s a whole other ballgame.
We are referring to the essential numbers you need to get your head around when you are marketing your business.
If you are not tracking, measuring, and adjusting your marketing efforts, you are missing out on an enormous amount of valuable information!
Tracking your business analytics helps you create effective customer pathways so you can boost your profits and grow your business.
But how do you know what numbers to track, and where you even start?
Read on for all the answers to those burning questions about analytics, starting with…
What Numbers Do I Need to Know?
There are four different sets of marketing numbers you should be monitoring in your business:
Website Data
Your website is the most valuable piece of online real estate that you own. Unlike social media platforms where you are at the mercy of big companies, your website is yours to do with as you wish.
It’s also one of the most critical parts of your customer pathway, so it’s vital that you understand the data that arises from people visiting your various web pages.
You should have a thorough understanding of the basic analytics, such as:
- How many people are exposed to your website in Google results
- How many people click through to your website
- What is the percentage of return visitors to your site
- How long do visitors browse your site for
- What is the conversion rate (for both leads and sales)
- What is the conversion value percentage
- What is your most valuable traffic source (i.e. where do the people who convert into customers come from – social media, search engines, or elsewhere?)
Social Data
Social data is about much more than just ego metrics like how many followers you have or how many likes you get.
The most important numbers you can collect from your social media accounts are:
- Reach
- Engagement
- Click-through rates
- Percentage conversion rate
- Percentage conversion value
Email Data
Your email list is another highly valuable piece of the marketing puzzle because it belongs to you. While email may not be as trendy as social media, it’s actually one of the most effective marketing tools in your arsenal!
Here are the vital email metrics you need to know:
- Percentage open rate
- Percentage click-through rate
- Percentage conversion rate
Sales Data
And now we come to the money end of the customer pathway – your sales!
Here are the most important figures you should be gathering from your sales data:
- Number of sales
- Value of sales
- Average transaction amount
- Lifetime customer spend
- Customer acquisition cost
Phew – that might feel like data overload, but once you know how, these metrics are straightforward to gather and can make an immense difference to your business.
Why Does It Help Me To Know Them?
Our customer pathway has many moving parts, and any one of them can affect your sales success.
The beauty of having this data at your fingertips is that small changes or tweaks can lead to huge changes in results.
Our numbers aren’t looked at in isolation. We analyse them and integrate them into our entire customer pathway as a system.
But do you know my favourite reason why we should know our numbers?
It’s because knowing our existing numbers can help us predict what traffic we need to achieve our goals. Knowledge truly is power when it comes to marketing our business!
Analytics And The Customer Pathway
Each set of numbers helps us answer useful questions about each step in our customer pathway. We can use this data to assess its health and make growth predictions.
Let’s quickly revisit the five primary segments of our customer pathway:
- 1. Entry Point
- 2. Trust Bridge
- 3. Conversion Method
- 4. Offer 1
- 5. Upsell
The analytics we collect and record from our website, social media accounts, email, and sales data help us answer essential questions from each stage of the pathway, such as:
- How many people know about our business, and where are they finding out about us?
- How much does it cost to get a new customer?
- What’s our most valuable source for sales?
- How many people visited our sales page, and how many people converted?
- What is the sales conversion rate?
- What’s the average customer spend?
- What’s the average transaction value?
And many more…
Once you have the precious answers to those questions, you can really dig down into the juicy stuff.
You will gain insight into the numbers that most affect your revenue, and see exactly how you can tweak them to get a direct increase in your profits.
You will be able to spot the weak points in your customer pathway and take practical steps to strengthen them step by step.
Think of your business as the engine of a car, and your marketing numbers as the tools. You, of course, are the mechanic. With your newfound knowledge and tools, you will be able to peer under the hood and make all the adjustments needed to get your business running like a dream.
How Often Should I Record Them?
Now that you know what numbers should make it onto your list, you need to know how often to record them and the best way to capture them.
To keep everything organised and easy to understand, you will need a great tracking system.
I recommend that you put aside 30 minutes once a month to sit down and enter all your numbers into your system.
In our Know Your Numbers course, you will receive a free number tracker to print out and use.
If you don’t have time to collect your marketing numbers every month, you could always outsource the task to a virtual assistant, leaving you more time to review the data and tweak your customer pathway as needed.
How Do I Do it?
So, you know what numbers you need to collect, why they are so essential, and how often you should record them. But exactly how and where can you find these magical numbers to transform your business?
There are a number of tools and methods you can use. Some may involve a small learning curve, but once you have done it a few times, it will become second nature.
Many of the channels and platforms you use in your marketing will have free built-in features to help you find your numbers. Or, you can invest in specially designed apps or programs that mine the data for you.
For your website, you will use Google Analytics to find out how many people visit your site and where they are coming from. (Learn how to use Google Analytics here)
Your social media platforms have built-in systems that provide this data for you if you know where to look, and your email program will do the same.
Important sales data can be found in your website sales dashboard or Xero, depending on what sales system you use.
When you are first learning how to use these various features in your different marketing channels, it can be quite confusing and overwhelming. It’s helpful to have a step by step guide to walk you through it and explain exactly what numbers to gather and how to find them.
The Know Your Numbers course does just that. You will learn precisely how to discover those numbers.
But knowing isn’t the same as doing, so the next step of levelling up your marketing will be finding out…
What To Do With The Numbers?
Our numbers mean very little without a reference point. How do we know if the number of visitors to our website is good or bad? Or what percentage of conversions we should be aiming for?
Know Your Numbers gives you the inside scoop on how to make sense of your numbers to make sure you are heading in the right direction.
Once you know the key marketing metrics to measure, I’ll show you how to use them to make predictions and grow your sales using step by step video training.
You will learn how to improve your most important numbers to grow your business.
We’ll focus on things like:
- How to increase the number of hits to your website
- How to ensure effective email marketing
- How to improve your email open and click-through rates
- How to have a good conversion rate
- How to get a high transaction value and lifetime customer value
At the end of the Know Your Numbers course, you will be ready to create your very own marketing action plan using your Numbers Strategy Workbook. You will also have the knowledge you need to understand how your marketing is working and how to tweak it to be even better.
But Analytics Aren’t For Me…
Research shows that businesses that use data-driven personalisation get 5 to 8 times the return on investment on marketing spend over those who don’t.
So, are analytics on your radar now?
Knowing your marketing numbers allows you to get strategic with your business. With digital data available at the touch (or two) of a button, there’s no excuse for not knowing what goes on under the hood of your business.
If you would like to empower yourself to be a badass marketing mechanic and get your hands covered in numbers, check out the Know Your Numbers course today and get stuck in.
About the author:
Kat Soper is the Founder and Head Trainer of The Helpful Academy Online Business School.
Kat is passionate about helping start-ups and small businesses succeed and achieve their business goals so that they can achieve the lifestyle they desire (and deserve).