Hey what’s up guys, welcome to inside the mind where we talk about online marketing strategy, what it is, why it’s important, and why you should care.
 
In the last episode, we talked about strategic networking and a simple way to start finding communities with your prospective customers.
 
This week, we’re going to talk about Key Performance Indicators and how to create a simple dashboard so you can measure progress and determine success.

(troll face guy)
Why talk about this? Metrics are Boring! Can’t I just try a bunch of stuff and wait for something good to happen?

Of course you could, and plenty of people do, but when you’re looking back at your stats 6 months from now, how will you remember everything going on at the time so you can repeat your success? And how are you going to know what stuff was a total waste of time?

(troll face guy)
Uhh..

The reason for setting up Key Performance Indicators is to have measures and goals within certain time frames. When you break down your efforts with these Key Performance Indicators, you can easily determine which of your efforts are yielding results, and what’s holding you back.

Now what we’ll be going over today is just a basic view of key performance indicators, and there are really hundreds of ways  these can be set up, but this is a good place for you to get started.

First things first, before you set up your Key Performance Indicators, you need to define your goal.

(scrolling list)

Pick One. Have a target you’d like to achieve, and set a timeframe. That could mean more traffic, more sales, what have you. And you need to have a specific set of actions in place to help move your numbers. Without specific actions to measure against, you’re just measuring for measuring’s sake.

For Example actions for “traffic building” could include, (Guest posting on blogs, employ link building strategies, Power Digging, Power Stumbling, Submit to article directories, host a teleseminar, and so on)  

With that in mind, there are three types of performance indicators.

The first is Raw Numbers. This can be Number of Traffic, Number of Ebooks, Number of Mentions on Other Blogs, that type of thing.

The Next type of Measure is Progress. This comes in the form of percent complete. If you want to attain a certain amount of traffic, or sell a certain number of ebooks, this is where you track your percentage of completion towards that goal.

And the last measure is percentage of Change. This is a directional measure,as an example increase in sales  over last month, last week, or last year.

And now that you have that set up, let’s dive a little deeper into some other things you need to think about when you’re setting your measures.

After you’ve determined what the measure actually is, you need to determine the source. and ask yourself, do you already have the data? or is it new, and something you have to collect?

So your source for your raw numbers might be something like your Google Analytics, On Progress it might be your Content Strategy, and with your % of Change it might be a Profit and Loss report.

It’s really important to know where your data is coming from so you know month over month what you’re calculating.

Frequency - This is where you determine how often you’re measuring certain goals. With something like traffic for the year, you could track your visitors weekly or monthly, progress you could track quarterly, and percentage of change you could track monthly.

So to recap, we’re looking at what we’re measuring, where we’re getting the data, and how often we’re measuring it.

And the last item that goes along with your key performance indicators is what is the target? What are we trying to achieve?

After we have all of the data, all that’s left is to graph it. With something like Traffic, we could display that information in a bar graph. With our goals, I’m a big fan of the thermometer, and percentage of change is always best shown with a line graph.   

And Once you reach your goals, you can say (It’s Peanut Butter Jelly Time!)

Now when you’re using this basic dashboard, make sure you have very specific sets of controls.

In the end, you want to be able to say “I did x, y, and z and got these results.” and if you’re using additional tactics that you’re not measuring, your results will become skewed, leaving you with an  inaccurate picture of how effective a particular strategy was working.

If you want to test different strategies against each other, set up multiple dashboards to see what methods are more effective to reach your goals.

Because when you know what works, you can increase your efforts in that area, to improve performance, then learn ways to systematize the process to keep it going while you start improving in other areas.  

(Peanut Butter Jelly Time)

Alright, that’s all I’ve got for today’s episode of Inside the mind, thanks so much watching.

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