Analytics Without Overwhelm: Making Good Podcast Feature

I love teaching people to make more purposeful decisions in their business, so that they can get more clients, make more sales, and build businesses that will make a difference in their lives. That’s why I was delighted to be a guest on the podcast Making Good!

Making Good is a podcast for people who want a business that makes them money, makes them proud, and makes the world a better place. Hosted by the fabulous Lauren Tilden, this podcast focuses on building a strong small business, and using it as a tool for good.

You can listen to the episode below, get the full show notes on the Making Good website, or find it on your favorite podcast app, like Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

I had so much fun talking to Lauren, and highly recommend giving her show a listen!

In this episode, we discussed:

How to not be overwhelmed by analytics
The kinds of data that are relevant for small businesses to pay attention to
The benefit of tracking analytics
The change happening with Google Analytics (UA to GA4) and what folks need to do
My philosophy of “data over drama”
Why it’s important to detach self-worth from business performance
And more

Grab your free analytics Goodies!

Download my Minimal Metrics Cheat Sheet
Save your seat for my new free class, Data-Driven Magic: How to Ditch Guesswork + Skyrocket Sales (with Google Analytics!)

Analytics, Podcast Features

The Big And Important Changes To Google Analytics: Networking and Marketing Made Simple Podcast Feature

In case you missed the news, on July 1, 2023 Google is officially retiring it’s old Analytics platform – Universal Analytics (UA).

What does that mean for you as a small business owner??

Recently I had a chance to discuss exactly that with Scott Aaron, on this episode of his podcast: Networking and Marketing Made Simple!

Scott is an award-winning online marketer, who specializes in building personal brands on LinkedIn. He created the podcast Networking and Marketing Made Simple to give entrepreneurs, business coaches, those with high-ticket offerings, and online business owners, quick, easy, and effective tips on how to grow your business, brand, and bank account using LinkedIn.

You can listen to the episode below, or find it on your favorite podcast app, like Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Grab your free analytics goodies!

Download my Minimal Metrics Cheat Sheet
Save your seat for my new free class, Data-Driven Magic: How to Ditch Guesswork + Skyrocket Sales (with Google Analytics!)

Analytics, Podcast Features

Are You Prepared for the Google Analytics Changes?: Entrepreneur Rescue Mission Podcast Feature

In case you missed the news, on July 1, 2023 Google is officially retiring it’s old Analytics platform – Universal Analytics (UA).

What does that mean for you as a small business owner??

That’s exactly what I discussed with my friend Nancy, on this episode of her podcast: Entrepreneur Rescue Mission!

Nancy Evans is a content marketing expert, and the founder of BYOB Agency. She created the Entrepreneur Rescue Mission podcast to help new entrepreneurs learn where to start building their businesses online. Nancy walks you through helpful tips (in very quick nugget-sized episodes) to help you get started and growing in your business and brand!

You can listen to the episode below, or find it on your favorite podcast app, like Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Grab your free analytics Goodies!

Download my Minimal Metrics Cheat Sheet
Save your seat for my new free class, Data-Driven Magic: How to Ditch Guesswork + Skyrocket Sales (with Google Analytics!)

Productivity, Systems & Workflows

How I Track My Analytics In Less Than 30 Minutes a Month

I’m going to make this short and sweet… In this quick video, I show you how I track my business analytics in less than 30 minutes a month. Hit play now to learn how!

Want to grab 30-Min Metrics™ for yourself?

Click here to get started!

30-Min Metrics™ includes my Tracking Template, built in Airtable*, along with a step-by-step video guide on how to make it perfect for your business.

Plus, I help you identify your most important metrics so you don’t waste your time and energy tracking numbers that don’t matter.

So if you want to make tracking quick and easy, and actually use your numbers to grow your business, grab 30-Min Metrics™ now!

*My template only requires a free account, although there are bonuses for Pro Plan users. Click here to register for your free account, and see what Airtable can do! (The link provided is a referral link. That means I get a small commission when you sign up, at no cost to you. I only ever provide referral or affiliate links to products that I have really used and love.)

Systems & Workflows

3 Metrics Every Business Should Review at the End of the Year

Review End of Year Metrics to Set New Year Goals

If you’re working on wrapping things up for this year and planning out your business goals for next year, this is the video for you. (They can be super helpful to review at the end of each month, too!)

So, there are three primary metrics that I think every online business should cover during their end of year review. These will help you gauge how your business did this year and – more importantly – set effective goals for next year.

#1: Product and Service Conversion Rates

What is a Sales Conversion Rate?

The percentage of people who purchased your product or service after viewing it.

Now, before I scare you off with math, let me tell you that my 30-Min Metrics™ analytics system calculates these conversion rates (and a whole lot more) for you. It also helps you collect all the necessary data throughout the year, so you don’t have to go digging to do your end of year review.

It makes analytics quick and easy, and is fully customizable for any business. So if you don’t want to have to dig through all your numbers at the end of the year and then have to do a bunch of math, click to grab 30-Min Metrics™ now.

Ok, back to the math.

How To Calculate Your Conversion Rates

For products with sales pages, take the number of product sales made this year and divide it by the number of sales page views you had this year.

product conversion rate = # product sales ÷ # sales page views

For services where you use some sort of sales call or consultation as a point-of-sale, take the number of service bookings this year, and divide it by the number of sales calls or consultations you did.

service conversion rate = # service bookings ÷ # sales calls

What You Can Tell From Your Conversion Rates

With your sales conversion rates in hand, you know approximately how many people need to go through your funnel for you to make a sale.

This helps you plan out your traffic needs based on your revenue goals for next year.

For example, let’s say you want to sell 100 of your handmade slippers for cats next year, and you know your product conversion rate is 3%. You know you can expect to make approximately 3 sales for every 100 people who visit your Cat-tastic Kitty Slippers, so to make 100 sales, you’ll need to get 3,333 views on your sales page.

Here’s the math:

traffic needed = sales goal ÷ product conversion rate

( 3,333 = 100 ÷ 0.03 )

The same thing works for services. If you want to book 10 clients for your 1:1 Standing Up To Your Cat Training, and you know your consult call conversion rate is 40% (so for every 100 consult calls you would expect to book 40 clients), you know you’ll need to do 25 consult calls next year to reach your goal.

In other words:

sales calls needed = sales goal ÷ service conversion rate

( 25 = 10 ÷ 0.4 )

That way you can put some real math behind your goals for the new year!

#2: Your Most Popular Content

What counts as "popular"?

Which of your primary content got you the most attention. More specifically, which of your content got the most traffic.

How To Find Your Most Popular Content

In Google Analytics, go to Behavior>Site Content>All Pages, and change the primary dimension to Page Title. Which pages and posts had the most page views? Which had the highest average time on page?

For YouTube, open Advanced Mode in Channel Analytics and check out the list in the Videos tab. Which videos had the most views? Which had the highest average percentage viewed?

(The video above includes a quick walk-through on these!)

What You Can Tell From Your Most Popular Content

This helps you figure out what kind of content gets your audience to click through, and what keeps them around the longest. That way you know what kinds of content to focus on more next year.

(You can also flip this around and check out your worst-performing content, to see what you should avoid.

#3: Your Primary Traffic Sources

What Are Your Primary Traffic Sources?

Here, we’re looking at where most of your customers and/or clients came from this year.

How To Find Your Primary Traffic Sources

This might mean looking at…

(The video above includes quick walk-throughs on the first two of these, as well!)

What You Can Tell From Your Primary Traffic Sources

You’ll be able to tell where most of your audience is coming from. This might seem like a “no – duh” moment, but…

When you know where your audience came from this year you can make better decisions about where to direct your content marketing efforts next year.

If something worked really well this year, keep doing it! Do it more!

On the other hand, if you spent a bunch of time putting out content on a platform and your end of year review shows it didn’t bring in a lot of traffic to your offers, you know you need to make some adjustments next year.

Now... Homework Time!

Go alculate your conversion rates, find your best content (or your worst), and identify your top traffic sources. Then come back and tell me: What is one goal you’re setting for your business for next year?

And if you want to make your business analytics super easy, check out 30-Min Metrics™.

I help you identify your most important metrics so you don’t waste your time and energy tracking numbers that don’t matter.

Plus, you get my endlessly customizable 30-Min Metrics™ tracking template and step-by-step video guide on how to make it perfect for your business, so you can actually use your numbers to grow your business in the coming year.

I can’t wait to see you inside!

Productivity

Why I Don’t Track Social Media Analytics

"Why don't you track social media analytics?"

Okay, picture this: You hit post on your beautiful image with your carefully crafted message and your painstakingly selected key words and hashtags and blah, blah, blah… and crickets.

What starts going through your head?

What I posted must not be interesting enough, relevant enough, eye-catching enough for people to stop and pay attention.

I’m not interesting.

I’m an imposter.

No one likes me, OMG, what do I do?!

Now, maybe you don’t get quite as worked up about it as I do. I experience something called rejection sensitive dysphoria (RSD), so the lack of response makes me feel like crap. But even without that, putting that much work into something and getting zero response doesn’t feel great, does it?

On the flip side, getting a ton of likes leaves me flying high.

YAY! I did something right! I’m helping my audience! I’M AMAZING!

But here’s the thing: you can get a hundred likes on a social media post, and… then what?

Social media likes mean nothing unless those people are also clicking through to your offer.

The same thing goes for followers. You could have a gigga followers (that’s my 5-year-old’s word for A LOT – an unimaginable number), and if they’re not clicking through to your offer, they’re not converting. Plain and simple.

These are what we call “vanity metrics” – they might make you feel good (or not), but they don’t actually give you any real information about how your business is performing.

Now, are things like reach and engagement important? Sure. They tell you if your audience is responding to what you’re putting out.

But you don’t just want people to “like” what you’re posting on social media. You want to use social media to build that know-like-trust thing marketers are always talking about so that ultimately they buy something. And you can’t tell if they’re doing that from your reach or engagement (or any other metric you’ll find on a social media analytics/insights dashboard).

How I Choose Which Analytics I Do Track

When it comes to choosing what I track on a regular basis, I’m pretty picky. I don’t want to get stuck hyperfocusing on collecting numbers because that’s freaking easy to do. Collecting numbers into a pretty database feels productive. It takes time, and results in a concrete product.

But I don’t just want to collect numbers (and I don’t want you to just collect numbers either!) – I want to collect the numbers that are actually going to help me run a better business on a day-to-day basis.

So when it comes to social media the only metric I track is traffic to my website.

From that I can tell one super important thing: Are my efforts driving enough traffic so that I’m getting the number of leads I need to reach my sales goals?

If I’m spending a ton of time on one social media platform, and seeing no traffic from that platform to my website, I know something is wrong. And at that point I can go and take a look at my social media metrics to trouble-shoot what’s wrong.

How I Keep Track of What's Working on Social Media

Instead of tracking social media analytics on a regular basis, I do a quick visual review when I notice something is off about my traffic.

At that time I might look at…

What were my most engaged posts? Most importantly, what got the most clicks? How can I do more of that kind of content?
If my most engaged posts didn’t get very many clicks, why not? Did I provide a clear call to action? Did I make it easy enough to click?
What were my worst performing posts? Is there any kind of pattern I can spot (and avoid in the future)?

But these aren’t things that I need to keep track of on a regular basis.

The main thing I need to know on a monthly basis is: am I seeing the traffic I need from this social media platform?

If the answer is yes, YAY, I’m doing something right and I’m going to keep doing it. If the answer is no, I can do a quick scan of my platform to see what I might try to adjust. Without ever tracking my reach or engagement.

This saves me time in tracking every month, and it saves me from falling down the vanity metric rabbit hole.

I hope this makes sense. If you have any questions, drop them in the comments below!

Looking for more help with your analytics?

If you want to learn more about how I choose what metrics to track, check out 30-Min Metrics™.

It includes my complete Funnel-to-Goal Framework to help you identify your most important metrics (your KPIs – or key performance indicators – if you want some sexy industry speak) based on the structure of your sales funnel, so you don’t waste time tracking numbers that won’t help you grow your business.

Plus, you get my endlessly customizable 30-Min Metrics™ tracking template, along with a step-by-step video guide on how to make it perfect for your business.

So if you want to make tracking quick and easy, and actually use your numbers to grow your business, grab 30-Min Metrics™ now!

business metrics

Want to grab 30-Min Metrics™ for yourself?

Review End of Year Metrics to Set New Year Goals

#1: Product and Service Conversion Rates

What is a Sales Conversion Rate?

How To Calculate Your Conversion Rates

What You Can Tell From Your Conversion Rates

#2: Your Most Popular Content

What counts as "popular"?

How To Find Your Most Popular Content

What You Can Tell From Your Most Popular Content

#3: Your Primary Traffic Sources

What Are Your Primary Traffic Sources?

How To Find Your Primary Traffic Sources

What You Can Tell From Your Primary Traffic Sources

Now... Homework Time!

"Why don't you track social media analytics?"

Social media likes mean nothing unless those people are also clicking through to your offer.

How I Choose Which Analytics I Do Track

How I Keep Track of What's Working on Social Media

Looking for more help with your analytics?