Business Growth: Metrics to Measure

Business growth & planning for future success is all about tracking and understanding the data. So, what metrics do you need to measure, in order to track your business growth?

Before you start to plan what you want to achieve and map out what you need to do to make it happen, first you need to take a good look at where you are now, ie your starting point.

When you know where you are starting from, you can work more efficiently and spend your time and money more effectively. By recording and tracking the data, you can see what’s working, what isn’t, and what trends are starting to play out. And it all starts with recording where you’re at right now.

First, you’ll want to decide how you are going to record this information. You can write it down in a dedicated notebook, use an online document/file or even use a spreadsheet. Choose the method that you find easiest and you are most comfortable with using.

Are you ready to grow your online business over the next year? Let’s take a look at the key metrics you’ll want to record and measure…

Website Traffic

To grow you need to expand your reach. That means not only getting more traffic to your website, but also engaging the people that come to your site. You can do this by encouraging them to stick around and read more.

Website metrics to measure include total visitors, unique visitors, bounce rate, and of course where the traffic is coming from.

Business growth requires expanding your reach

Email List/Subscribers

Once you’ve got the website traffic, you’ll want to encourage people to sign up (or subscribe) your email list. Your next goal is always to get these people on your list.

Here you want to track total number of subscribers, conversion rates for each of your opt-in offers and pages, open rates for your emails, and also unsubscribes.

As you start to collect and review this data regularly, you’ll get a clearer picture of who your subscribers are.

Subscribers are a key metric for every online business

Customers

Subscribers are great, but customers are better. Start by keeping track of how many total customers you have and how many purchases per day, week, and month.

Other good numbers to look at are total lifetime value of your average customer, repeat purchases, and any refund requests.

Repeat customers + new customers = business growth

Income/Expenses

Finally, you’ll also want to keep track of your business financials. This is your typical accounting data. You want to keep track of your income as well as your expenses. With those two sets of numbers, you can easily calculate your overall profit.

This is something that you should do on a monthly basis at the very least. Again, how you do this will depend on personal preferences and your business model. If you sell a lot of low cost items it may be beneficial to track income on a daily basis, compared with the businesses who sell higher cost products/programs and make less sales may choose to track income weekly.

Track your business financials regularly

You can view most of this data in various places like Google Analytics, your online shopping cart and your email service provider for example. However, most people find it easier to measure business growth across the different aspects by having it all in one place. This also makes it easier to see the connections between the different sets of data.

Once you have your initial data collection set up, make it a habit to update the numbers regularly so you can see what’s working, what isn’t, and how much you’re growing as you move through the coming months and years.