Optimizing Your Business with the Right METRICS

Ty's writing in, with selling something like digital magazines, what are some good metrics to track?

Oh yeah, the ones we've already touched on. So we're subscription-based service as well. So things that I currently look into and I look into day in and day night is gonna be our acquisitions, right? So our number of signups, always looking at cancellations, looking at churn rate, which we discussed earlier. and then actually looking at LTV. And the reason I look at our lifetime value, and the reason I look at lifetime value is I wanna see the type of customers that we have coming in, expectation, you know, how long we expect them to be with us. And, um, we actually, because I'm, you know, Evan said this earlier, I'm kind of a nerd with this stuff. I break it out by channel and source. So I wanna see if I have a good amount of people that we referred, uh, that were sent to us from Facebook. I wanna understand what their turn rate is or what their lifetime value is. Those are the things that I look at constantly, nonstop. So sorry, that was long-winded, but acquisition, cancellations, churn rate, and lifetime value are the ones I look at.

I love it. And for me, you know, without knowing too much information about the business, I would say, again, look at what the sales funnel is. So you want people to buy your digital magazine. So where are they buying it from? Are they buying it from your website? Are they buying it from your newsletter? And if those are the two primary sources, then how do you then get people to the website and to the newsletter, right? I think you probably have a lot more success through a newsletter than just a website because you get to touch with them every week or every month or whenever you wanna send them content where with a website you're hoping that they land on it. It may only be a one-time thing, right? So are you using Facebook? Are you using YouTube videos? Are you going to networking events? And if you start to track this stuff and say, hey, here's how many leads I got to my newsletter list from going to this networking event, then you can say, okay, this is worth my time. I'm getting an ROI from it. Uh, and if you don't track it, then you don't know what's working and what's not, right? And maybe you shouldn't be doing Facebook at all because it's not getting—

it's not the best source for everyone. Exactly, right, right.

And then once you're getting some data, you can work— okay, well, how do I improve the numbers. How do I make it better? How do I optimize it, right? Maybe I test doing 2 emails a month and increase the quality, or maybe I work on going to higher quality or higher-end networking events that are specific to my audience, right? Once you know where your leads are coming from, it's easier to optimize your campaign, where to spend more time and potentially dollars too, uh, and then what you might want to cut back and eliminate from. There's the old adage in advertising that, you know, 50% of my advertising is being wasted, I just don't know which half. Yeah, right. People don't know where they're spending money. And I get, again, it's hard for entrepreneurs that you're doing so many things, you know, you're trying to run a quality business and you're in the day-to-day of running it and you don't necessarily wanna think about all these things. And everybody says, okay, you gotta do this social media, you gotta get on Blab now, you gotta get on YouTube, you gotta do all these things. And, and like, when do I actually have time to run my business?

Right. Uh, and the nice part is a lot of the tools that people are using now, like YouTube, um, Blab, Facebook, uh, free analytics, uh, Google Analytics. If no one in the group is using that yet and you have a website, you should be on that constantly every day just to see, you know, what type of traffic you're getting. Where are people falling off in the funnel? Um, where are, where are my referrals coming from? Am I getting, um, you know, 1,000-some referrals from a certain domain as opposed to another one? So you just want to make sure you know where your traffic's coming from, how it's converting, and where they're dumping off.