Tracking key metrics and knowing what to do with them can help your startup succeed. There are several metrics that you should use to track your startup’s success, from customer engagement rate to sales. While we can’t cover all of the things you need to track, we can cover the basics so that you know what to track and how to do it.
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Tools to Track Your Success
Growing a small business isn’t easy, but with data you can make informed decisions. Your metrics let you know how things are going, and without them, you’ll have no clear picture of how your business is doing. Having the right analytical skills and knowing how to use the data can help you learn more about your customers, improve business function, and promote sales. Here are the tools that you need to track your startup’s success.
1. Keyword Tracking Tools
Whether you invest in search engine optimization or you sell your products on Amazon, you’ll need to find out exactly where you stand. Amazon SEO and regular SEO are a bit different, but they both depend on rankings. Ultimately, you want to be in the number one spot so that you can attract more customers.
An Amazon keyword tool allows you to see where your products are ranking on Amazon search results so that you can make efforts to improve your rankings and measure the impact as you rise through the ranks.
2. Sales Software
Whether you use Square or any other type of sales or payment software, you’ll need to be able to see exactly where your sales stand on any given day. Your online store dashboard should give you these numbers and track all of your sales without you having to dig too deeply.
However, robust sales software can help you understand your customer acquisition cost and sales per day, month, and year and show you product sales trends, such as your busiest and slowest seasons. Other information that your sales software can give you is:
- The average revenue per user
- Customer lifetime value
- Purchase frequency
- New vs. returning customers and their values
- Average order size
- Net margin
3. Financial Management Software
Calculating your costs can be as simple as looking at your books and determining where your money goes. However, you’ll need to do some math to figure out what your overhead cost is so that you can ensure you’re bringing in enough revenue to cover your costs and bring in additional money to pay yourself. Adding up all of your costs and finding out how much money you bring in can help you see whether your business is losing money, breaking even, or making money.
A financial management system can help you track how much your employees cost so that you can determine which departments need more help and which can be downsized.
4. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a marketing and website analysis tool that helps you learn more about your website. All businesses need a website even if they aren’t selling products directly through that website. If you’re selling products through your website, you’ll need Google Analytics to help you understand more about your website visitors, including which pages they spend the most time on and from which pages they exit your website.
Google Analytics provides website owners with tons of great data about their customers and their journey through the website so that they can determine where they need to optimize pages to promote more sales. Make sure that you learn about all that Google Analytics can provide you with to not feel lost when you set up your account.
Taking advantage of technology can enable you to grow your startup. Use these four tools in your quest to achieve small business success.