In this week’s SBB Live, I’m getting my data nerd hat on and talking to you about metrics!

I know it doesn’t sound sexy and I know a lot of you are probably going, “Yawn, off, I’m out of here. I don’t want to talk about analytics and metrics.”

But seriously, it’s a really, really important topic!

Online Business Metrics: Why so important?

A lot of people get super obsessed with analytics that don’t really mean anything.

Being super concerned about your bounce rate and trying to find plugins and to reduce it doesn’t mean enough to make it worth the amount of time and effort people throw into it.

Most people focus on the wrong stats, and that will slow down your business, not grow it #secretbloggersbusinessClick To Tweet.

That’s where it comes down to having three mighty metrics that are important.

I’m going to explain to you what that is, why they’re important, how to figure out what your three mighty metrics are, and then how you can use them to grow your business and blog.

Online Business Metrics: The Story

I’m going to start off with a little story.

This is a recent conversation I had with a friend of mine (I hope she doesn’t mind me sharing it).

She also has an online business and was having a bit of a meltdown.

Things just weren’t progressing as quickly as she wanted, she didn’t feel like she was making enough money,  she was feeling like she was going backwards and maybe it was time to throw in the towel.

She’d wasted all this time and effort creating her online business over the last few years, and she still didn’t feel like she was far enough along for the amount of effort she’d put in.

Online Business Metrics: The Backstory

A month earlier, my mastermind group had gotten together, and put together this really awesome plan for some new stuff she’s going to be implementing into her business.

It was all new things that she was going to be rolling out, and as everyone knows, these things take time to get setup, and time to see results.

I think she spent her effort setting up this new stuff, and then wanted the results to be instant.

But as it was taking a little bit longer for the ball to get rolling, she just felt like it was a failure, and it was all useless.

The new stuff just wasn’t working and she wanted to throw in the towel.

This is really common, a lot of people have that reaction when you create something new.

You put it out into the world and It’s not an overwhelming success.

You’re not just blown away with how successful it is, so a lot of people just want to ditch it straight away.

Rather than going, “Okay, well is this progress forward? Is this better than where we were before? Is this getting towards to where we want it to be? Now, is this stuff that we can tweak to improve it, and to increase it?”

I  had to pull her back from the ledge.

She was going to delete her email list!

This is how serious she was about how everything just wasn’t working, and she was ready to throw in the towel.

Even though a week ago she’d been super excited.

She has the kind of business where she will only make a couple of sales a month, but they’re high ticket items.

The time in between can feel really famine.

You want to go, “Okay, I’ve got this new thing, I’m just sending it out into the world. Now I need to get 10 sales in the first day, then I can go, yep, done perfect, it works.”

That’s not the way these things always work.

Sometimes you get three sales in one day, sometimes you won’t get a sale for a week.

You need to know how your online business metrics work so that you can see the pattern and so you can see the numbers that you really should be chasing.

She was really super focused on this particular amount of money that she wanted to be making every month, and it was a couple of days into this month and the money wasn’t here yet, therefore she was a failure.

I said, “All right, Do you have metrics other than dollars that you can be tracking, that will show you that you’re progressing, and that you’re getting towards this outcome?”

Online Business Metrics: Mighty Metric #1 

Normally one of those online business metrics comes down to knowing what your conversion rate is.

You need to know how many people need to see your offer, or you need to speak to if you’re a coaching client, and you’re selling high ticket items, or need to read an email from you if you’re selling courses for an evergreen funnel.

How many people need to see your offer before someone buys it?

Normally you would have to have had a few hundred people go through.

You can’t tell from one or two people, what your conversion rate is, because you can have one person buy it out of 10, then it’s 10%.

You need to have statistical significance (that’s what they call it).

You actually have to have had a few people, at least a couple hundred to go through to get that number, but it’s a good number to know.

How many people need to see your offer before someone buys?

That’s your conversion rate.

The good thing about this online business metric is you actually don’t need to track it too much.

You just need to keep on top of whether or not your current offer is sitting above or below that usual conversion rate.

You need to set yourself a conversion rate benchmark.

Then whenever you’re creating something new, or you’re tweaking something, or changing something, think about your conversion rate.

Online Business Metrics: Mighty Metric #1 Example

“Okay, I normally convert at four percent, or 10%, or 20%,”

“This new thing I’ve done, now a few people have gone through it, is higher or lower?”

Therefore, is it good or bad?

This is why these numbers and having them at top of your head makes it really easy to see progress, even after just a small amount of time.

Also it really helps with decision making “Is this a good choice? Is this something I should continue to pursue, or is it something I should maybe just chuck in the towel on?”

Online Business Metrics: Might Metric #2

The other mighty metrics area really something that’s going to depend on what your business is, and what’s important for you.

If you’ve got online store it might also be really important for you to know the number of people visiting your site, to give you a rough indicator of the amount of sales you should get each day.

Also, it’s good to know your the average cart size.

How much money on average are people buying when they purchase from your site?

So you can start to track this and say, “All right, well am I on track?”

If you’re having a rubbish day and you feel like the wheels are falling off, and things aren’t working, or you’ve tried something new and you need to be able to have a really good objective look at whether it does or doesn’t work.

Come back to these three mighty online business metrics that you’ve set and say, “All right, is this on track with my benchmarks? Or is it higher or lower?”

Online Business Metrics: Mighty Metric #3

If you sell online products, and you have an evergreen funnel, then a really good number to know always is how many people opted into your content upgrades, and all the other offers that popped into the top of your funnel that day?

How many sales are you going to be able to expect the next day, or the next week, or however long it takes for your people to go through your evergreen funnel.

These are the online business metrics that are really important to know, and to know them almost daily.

I want you to think about what are three numbers that aren’t sales that you should be tracking?

That are going to let you know if your business is on track each day, each week, each month, and that you can also use as a really good benchmark, or guide that anything new you do or try, any optimisation stuff you might be making, any tweaks, any changes.

This is your line in the sand where you go, “Everything on this side is good, everything on that side isn’t working so well.”

And you can use that to make some really powerful decisions in your business.

I want you to go away, think of what those benchmarks are.

The reason I know a few of you will be going, “Oh no, but tracking sales. That’s my most important thing.”

You can do that if you want. If that is going to work best for you, but I like people to try and have most of their metrics not sales related, because everyone tracks sales.

You always know how much money that you’ve made, because you need to pay your bills.

But this is more for those days when for whatever reason, the sales haven’t come.

So you can have this tool to go back to look at and go, “No, it’s okay as the other metrics are still holding. Tomorrow will be better.”

You know that if these other numbers are where they’re supposed to be, the sales will come.

Or you’re going to be able to see the hole and say, “Actually, hang on a second. The reason we haven’t had any sales is because last week, we didn’t have any opt ins. Of course no one’s going to be buying through our evergreen funnel because there’s no one in it.”

You can also use these to start to scale.

When you know what your conversion rates are, when you know how many people need to be visiting your site, or getting into your evergreen funnel to make X, Y, Z, sales, then you can start to play with different ways of getting more people in there as well.

Knowing your numbers is really, really powerful.

It’s not super scary.

These are things that directly impact how successful your business is, and that they’re really, really super important to know, and have on hand, and be able to track each and every day.

What metrics are you tracking in your business? Have you found them useful? Let me know by commenting below!