I’ve run many reports over the years. Far too many.
Numbers have had to be produced on what often felt like a manager’s whim. Daily, weekly, monthly and annual stats… 🤯 But these reports would rarely prompt any change.
Now I have my own business and, as I am the chief decision maker, I can take my learnings and introduce my own philosophy towards tracking performance.
I will be making this data public as I build the business and am even more conscious that it needs to be worthwhile.
There are many ‘experts’ out there telling you what you should and shouldn’t look at but what I have found is there is not a one size fits all approach. You have to look at what is right for you and your business.
Don’t get me wrong, measuring the right things is important. I just don’t want to measure anything that doesn’t matter. I want to measure the things that highlight opportunities and problems. Generally my reporting ties back to AARRR. I’ll cover that in another post.
My only piece of advice, is report on as little as you can.
Tomorrow I will produce my first public report. In it I will highlight everything I track. I track these things because if I can introduce marginal, although ideally bigger gains, I know my company will grow.
As an example, I track sign ups to my Digital PR Datasets mailing list. I know that the bigger the pool of people in this list, the higher the opportunity of selling a dataset. If this number plateaus or worse still drops off, I need to know why and then fix it. I will also track the conversion rate of this product. If that drops dramatically, there’s an issue that I need to identify and fix.
These numbers themselves won’t identify the opportunity or problem but it will point me in the direction of where to start looking.
Keep an eye out tomorrow for the first report and feel free to let me know if there is anything you think I should or shouldn’t be looking at.