The key measureables for your web site business

When you start to build your business online, knowing what to measure helps to tell you how to build and what elements matter and what doesn't.  Too often people don't create a feedback loop to let themselves see how they are doing. These loops are important as you want to improve fast, and knowing what doesn't work to improve your key measureables is critical to success.

The following list is pretty straight forward, and pretty comprehensive..


Site traffic/ Email list

• Email list growth/ Number of new subscriber - is it going the right direction? Make a net list gain/loss.
  
• Sales - what are your sales - do you have any? If not, this is where to start. Put a buy button right now.
  
• Customer retention/ Number people unsubscribed - Are you giving value, are your customers happy? You do not want to be a churn and burn business. You spend many getting customers, and you don't want them to leave once you found them.
  
• Income statement -  There are only three ways to make more money, sell more, charge more, and do what you do for less. You need all three.
• Total site visits - is it improving, not improving? Experiment and see what causes what.
  
• Absolute uniques - don't fool yourself, how many new people come to your site. (yes these are people, not uniques)
  
• Google rank for primary keywords - Another critical piece, are you doing well in the search engine, does your business and and your web site target the market you want?
  

Sales

• Total sales - What is total sales dollars, how much do you sell?
  
• Sales page conversion - how many of your emails, clicks, visits become sales? This matters, the more you can improve, the more profitable the process. Relationships matter here, visitors feeling they count.
  
• Customer retention - refunds, lifetime, repeats -  see above. You want them to buy from you again and again.
  

Income

• Lifetime sales - how much do you make from each customer over time?
  
• Monthly sales - Dollars a month, measure mointh to month, and rolling average, look for trends.
  
• Top five streams -  think 80/20, Pareto's Law, and make sure of all your streams you know the top 5, know them, model on them and creat more like them.
  
• Other streams -  these are the others, where are they going? Should you keep putting resources? How can you improve?
  

To paraphrase Drucker, what gets measured, gets done. 

Make sure you are going the direction you think you are, and the direction you want. Measure things.

D