Statistics: Part 3, Why Your Stats Are Only Telling You Half The Story

I’ll bet that you yourself track one or two major stats on a somewhat regular basis. Most website owners track visitor traffic, Adsense clicks, RSS subscribers and the like. Brick and mortar business owners track income, customers, items sold and shipped, etc. This is fine and these are definitely good things to track as they are the broad picture of your site, business, etc.

Unfortunately, most of us stop there at the broad picture while it’s still way too broad to do us much good.

The problem with only tracking visitors or income or RSS subscribers is this:

Money and customers are not the products you create. They’re incidental to the products you create.

People subscribe to your site because you write good content. People give you money because you give them a website in exchange. It’s fine to track your income and subscriber-base, but as stated in the first post of this series you must also track your personal production.

Are some stats too minute to matter?

Maybe, but to put it bluntly, you need to track everything you do that counts towards the final broad picture. You can and should keep stats on every single process related to your income and production. If that’s confusing, hold tight. We’ll explore exactly how to do this with a real-life example.

If you’re a writer like me, don’t just track your readership numbers. Track what you do, and track it in such a way that it gives you control over your income, productivity, etc. And also track those things that get you jobs, such as sending out emails, guest-blogging, commenting on other blogs, etc. As a writer you might therefore keep these stats for your personal operation:

• Blog posts written per day
• Words written per day (for longer projects)
• Marketing to new potential clients
• Marketing to regular clients
• Meaningful comments left on other’s blogs
• New clients acquired

That last one is very very important and needs to be tracked regardless of your industry. Remember the flat, static graph we explored in the last post? Well, if you’re not picking up new clients, you’re putting yourself at risk. Even if your current clients are all Mr. Moneybags, at some point or other you’ll level off. That means you’re not growing.

If you keep stats like these, you’ll know which actions are giving you the most bang for your buck.

You’ll also know what not to do as you’ll see what’s a waste of time. For example, if you find that commenting on a ton of blogs never brings in the bacon, you can cut that down. Maybe you don’t stop entirely but do it only when you feel like being engaged in the community and not necessarily as a business action.

Or maybe you comment a bunch and see a nice upward spike in your stats. When you check your web analytics as a cross-reference, you may see that while you commented on a ton of sites, maybe only one is making the difference and you can direct your forces appropriately.

That is exactly what stats are for:

• Finding the actions that work and doing more of them
• Finding the actions that don’t work and stopping them

This is a very common refrain from Seth Godin, who applies these rules commercial advertising. Commercial advertising, per dollar spent, doesn’t really seem to work the way it used to. Millions and millions of dollars go into big media, but the marketing executives behind them will openly admit they have no idea if they bring in new customers or not or why. Lack of statistics.

Alright, Charlie, what about me?

Well, I don’t know you so I can’t be sure what sort of stats you need. You can always ask in the comments, but here are some general guidelines which should give you an idea of what to track:

• Finished projects out the door
• Advertising dollars/time spent
• New clients in
• Word-of-mouth clients – (find out who is really working for you and offer incentives)
• Scriptlance, eLance, Guru.com bids – (track them separately, as they are not all equal)
• Time spent per project
• Promotional items out
• Responses in from promotional items
• If you run multiple ads, use codes to track each separately as to expenditure and results

One item in there is a hidden gem: Time spent per project. Does something come up often that sort of stops you in your tracks? Like some weird code bug that you always seem to run into? Or some billing problem that always comes up? Pay attention to these time-thieves, figure out a way to streamline them and you’ll save time. And any of the time you don’t waste on one project, you can waste on another

Final wrap up

I hope you’ve found this series useful. While it may add a few extra minutes to your day to keep accurate statistics, the truth is they’ll probably save you far more time than you spend. And the amount of money they could add to your bottom line might surprise you!

As stated in comments from previous installments, there are fluctuations that might be all but impossible to find the source of. So be it. If you can’t find the source of a fluctuation don’t waste time on it or, worse yet, make a wild guess at what it might have been. Stats are most helpful when finding direct relationships between actions and results.

Another reader had a comment about how statistics for most people/business are much more complicated than tracking RSS numbers and such. That’s true…but regardless of how big your business is, you should be using stats for each “division” of the work you do. The whole point of doing so is to simplify the big picture.

For example, I run my own businesses by myself. That means I’m a marketer, a designer, a writer, a client relations specialist, a secretary, an accountant and dozens of other things. I keep stats on all that stuff. Why? Because doing so makes my business extremely simple. It also shows me where time is being wasted and where I can squeeze out some more profits. So…while you may have more divisions of your life and business to track, the stats themselves are very simple. They go up, they go down.

I hope these ideas make a difference in your life and business. If you have any questions or comments, I’d love to hear them!