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A Look At My KPI Spreadsheet
What’s a KPI? What are you supposed to be tracking? How can you use them? Is it really all that important to track them?
These questions are some of the most commonly asked ones I get around KPIs, and I figured that if I’m hearing the same questions over and over again – well, you’re probably wondering them as well.
So, today I’m taking you behind the scenes through my own personal KPI Tracker and outlining what exactly I track and what kinds of choices those numbers help me make.
Links and Resources Mentioned in This Episode:
- If you want your business to grow, effective marketing is crucial. But that doesn’t mean you have to spend a ton of time on your marketing – even if you’re a solopreneur. Do you dream of business growth, but aren’t gaining traction? Does the thought of tackling your marketing feel daunting? Or, do you understand the importance of effective marketing, but simply don’t have the time to get it done? There’s good news! Marketing doesn’t have to be so overwhelming, confusing, and complicated. Say goodbye to the confusion and complexity that has held you back, and say hello to a clear, actionable roadmap for business growth. In my book, Chasing Simple Marketing, I’ll take you on a journey to demystify marketing with simplicity as your guiding principle. You’ll walk away with a clear, concise, and personalized marketing strategy designed specifically for your entrepreneurial journey. You don’t need a Masters of Business Administration (MBA) or a background in business to tackle your marketing head-on thanks to the strategies and techniques in this book that deliver real results. No longer will marketing feel like an insurmountable mountain; instead, it will become an easily manageable and integral part of your business. Take your content from non-existent or inconsistent, to a true tool to grow your business by Chasing Simple Marketing. You can grab your own copy by heading to Amazon and searching for Chasing Simple Marketing, or you can hop over to amandawarfield.com/book to learn more about buying it for yourself.
- KPI Tracker
- This week’s action step: Set up your KPI tracker this week and add it to your todo list on the first of each month to fill out. Or, steal my KPI tracker for $47.
- This week’s book recommendation: Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng
- Find me on Instagram and tell me you completed this week’s action step: @mrsamandawarfield
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Have a comment about today’s episode, or a topic you’d like to suggest for a future episode? Shoot me an email over at hello@amandawarfield.com!
Rather Read? – Here’s the Transcript!
*Just a heads up – the provided transcript is likely to not be 100% accurate
What is a KPI? What are you supposed to be tracking? How can you use them? Is it really all that important to track them? These questions are some of my most commonly asked ones that I get around KPIs, and I figured that if I’m hearing the same questions over and over again, well, you’re probably wondering them as well.
So today I’m taking you behind the scenes through my own personal KPI tracker and outlining what exactly I track and what kinds of choices those numbers help me make. You’re listening to episode 208 of the Chasing Simple podcast, and I’m your host, Amanda Warfield. This episode was brought to you by my book, Chasing Simple Marketing.
And you can grab your own at amandawarfield. com / book.
How do I find time to create content without overwhelming myself? Where should I even be showing up in my marketing? How do I come up with fresh content ideas? Where should I be focusing my marketing efforts? What is lead generation anyways and how do I do it? Are launches still a thing? And most importantly, How do I put it all together to market my business strategically?
Can I really grow my business without spending all of my time marketing? These are some of the questions that float around in your head. When you think of marketing, welcome friend, this is chasing simple where practical marketing strategy meets simplicity. I’m your host, Amanda Warfield, simplicity focused content marketing and launch strategist, speaker, educator, and author of chasing simple marketing.
I traded in my classroom lesson plans for helping creative entrepreneurs sustainably fit marketing into their business without it taking over their business, so that they have time to grow their business, take time off, and live the life they dreamed about when they first decided to go out on their own.
When I’m working, you can find me working with one on one clients such as The Contract Shop and Rebecca Rice Photography on their marketing strategy and copywriting, or helping my students simplify their marketing and launches. And when I’m not, you can find me spending time outside with my husband, Russell.
Reading in our hammock, watching GameCock Sports, traveling, or forcing our cats to snuggle me. If you feel overwhelmed by marketing, you aren’t alone. Many entrepreneurs find marketing frustrating, overwhelming, and simply an obligation. They know they need it, but they don’t enjoy how easily it can suck up their time when what they really want to be doing, Is the thing that they started their business to do, which is why I’m here to help make marketing simple and less time consuming so that you can spend less time on your marketing and more time growing your business and doing what you love.
Each week offer you transparent conversations, actionable steps, and judgment free community to encourage and equip you. So grab yourself a cup of coffee or whatever your drink of choice is and meet me here each week for love, support, practical tips, and advice on uncomplicating your marketing and business.
Let’s do this entrepreneurship thing together, shall we? If you want your business to grow, effective marketing is crucial. But that doesn’t mean that you have to spend a ton of time on your marketing, even if you’re a solopreneur. Do you dream of business growth but aren’t gaining traction? Does the thought of tackling your marketing feel daunting?
Or do you understand the importance of effective marketing but simply don’t have the time to get it done? There’s good news. Marketing doesn’t have to be so overwhelming, confusing, and complicated. Say goodbye to the confusion and complexity that has held you back and say hello to a clear actionable roadmap for business growth.
In my book, Chasing Simple Marketing, I’ll take you on a journey to demystify marketing with simplicity as your guiding principle. You’ll walk away with a clear, concise and personalized marketing strategy designed specifically for your entrepreneurial journey. You don’t need an MBA or a background in business to tackle your marketing head on thanks to the strategies and techniques inside of this book that deliver real results.
No longer will marketing feel like an insurmountable mountain, instead it will become an easily manageable and integral part of your business. Take your content from non existent or inconsistent to a true tool to grow your business by chasing simple marketing. You can grab your own copy by heading to Amazon and searching for Chasing Simple Marketing, or you can hop over to amandawarfield. com / book to learn more about how you can grab a copy for yourself. Before we dive too deeply into the content of this episode, I just want to make sure that we’re all on the same page about what KPIs are. So KPI stands for a Key Performance Indicator. And in layman’s terms, that just means these are numbers that you’re tracking to help make decisions about your business and about your strategies.
So there are typically two types of numbers that you want to track. You’ve got maintenance numbers and strategic numbers. Maintenance numbers are things like how many Instagram followers you have, your email list size, etc. These are the ones that we like to know and can often think should be where we focus a lot of our KPI and goal attention.
They are helpful indicators in a lot of ways for whether or not a strategy is working. But they’re probably not actually the most important numbers for you to be tracking. What you really want to pay attention to are strategic numbers. These are where we should actually be focusing our goals and our attention.
They’re things like conversion rates, average length of membership, revenue, sales, etc. And so within my KPI tracker, I have six categories, revenue, membership, one on one coaching courses, shop offer, and marketing. And I’m going to go through and just share a little bit about each of those. So under my Revenue category, my revenue section, I track the revenue that comes in for every single offer that I have.
At this point in time, I’m only tracking my shop items as one offer. But, if you’re someone that has shop items and digital products, you might want to track them all separately. It just kind of depends on what your strategy is and what your goals are. For me, personally, this year, I just have a goal of a total shop number, revenue number, not an individual one for each offer.
So, for me it didn’t make sense to track each and every one. But, you can change that according to what makes the most sense for you and your goals. Then I have my one on one clients category, and I actually split this into two different categories within my own tracker spreadsheet. I have my quarterly clients, which are my ongoing clients, and then I also have my VIP days for my repurposing VIP day offer, because I just want to make sure that I’m tracking each of those.
Those were a big focus for me this year, and so this year I wanted to make sure that I am intentionally tracking all of those numbers. In past years, I haven’t tracked my quarterly client numbers because I filled all my spots the year before and didn’t need to track them throughout the year. However, this year I wanted to take on more clients than I typically do, and so I’m still tracking those numbers throughout the year.
Within my quarterly clients, I track how many clients I have, Any new clients I’ve signed, but I’m also tracking things and those are maintenance numbers But I’m also tracking things like how many inquiries I’ve gotten during the month and what that conversion rate was From inquiry to signed. I’m also tracking whether or not I didn’t need discovery calls I’m tracking how many people view the sales page and i’m tracking the conversion numbers for all of those And the purpose for that is so that I know okay My sales page conversion rate, my service page conversion rate, my goal is 2 percent for an inquiry and I’m only getting 0. 5%. I wonder if there’s anything I can do, any updates I can make. And so then I can test out updates to see if I can improve that conversion rate. I also can look at that and go, well, So, my conversion rate’s fine, but my views are low. I need to drive more traffic, and so it just kind of lets me know what the problem is.
If I’m not seeing the amount of inquiries I want to see, okay, well how do I fix that? Is it a views problem, or is it a conversion rate problem? And same thing with my VIP days, I track all the same things, I just track them separately from each other. Then I’ve got my membership numbers for the community, and I’m tracking how many members I have, how many new members I got during the month, how many cancelled during the month.
I track my VIP members and my standard members, how many I have of each. I track my scholarship members, my sales page views, my conversion rate, all different things. And I also track my opt in. Which I haven’t created yet, but I know what I’m going to create and will be creating, and I’ll be tracking that under this as well.
So I know, okay, how many people actually signed up for this opt in that is specific to the community, and what did it convert at. Then I’ve got my shop category, and this is the largest chunk of my KPI spreadsheet, actually. Where I take every single shop offer I have, and for each of them, I look at total sales.
The sales page views and the conversion rates. I also have broken it down into categories because I have three different categories within my business. I’ve got content creation, I’ve got content strategy, and then I have a launch strategy. And so I have it broken up into three smaller categories within the big shop category.
And so under content creation, I not only have all of the different offers in my shop for content creation, but I also have all of the freebies under that subheading under that topic. And so how many people actually signed up for these? And again, this tells me, okay, I’m not getting many signups. I need to drive more traffic to this thing.
I’m not seeing a lot of page views. I need to drive more traffic to this thing. Um, my conversion rate’s not awesome. I should probably go into that sales page and give it a tweak and give it some updates. Like I said, this is the largest trunk of my KPI tracker and this is what takes me the most time to fill out, but it is such invaluable information and it’s so important that I do that every single month.
Then I have a section for affiliate income and I list out the main places that I’m an affiliate for, like a honey book. Okay. How many people. How much income did I make from HoneyBook this month, and how many people signed up for the HoneyBook training that I have? And what’s that percent conversion rate?
And then I have, you know, just Amazon in general income, but then I also have just other affiliate income, other event income, because if I’m part of a bundle or part of a summit, that’s affiliate income, and it’s a one time thing, so I have that in there as well. And then finally, I’ve got my Marketing category and I’ve broken it into speaking and networking and Content marketing so the speaking and networking portion I cover things like how many speaking pitches did I send?
How many speaking gigs did I book? Did I do any guest trainings? Was I part of any summits? Did I do any podcast interviews so on and so forth was I? Attending a marketing event, or was I a vendor for anything? And just kind of keeping track of how many places that I actually show up this month to grow my audience.
Then I’ve got my content marketing and that’s things like my podcast downloads. How many reviews I have? Did I get new reviews? What was my most popular episode? How many email subscribers, my newsletter size, Instagram followers, all of those fun things that Again, our maintenance numbers, but are good to know, especially if you’re doing a specific marketing campaign where you’re driving to one of these.
And then my very final part, my very final category is my website category. And that’s where I’m looking at things like how many page views did I have? How many unique visitors did I have? What was the most popular page on my website this month? What was the second most, third most popular? And so that gives me an idea of what people are looking at.
Each and every month and then the cool thing with this one is that you can Look at it for this year, and then you can also go back to the year before and say okay in january What were the three most popular pages? And in the year before that, and you can see if there’s any patterns there, and that can also help, you know, what to create more content around to continue to push people to that specific page.
If that’s going to be your most popular page anyways, well, why don’t you really focus on it and give it even more oomph. So that is what my KPI tracker looks like. And that is something every single month on the first of the month or around the first of the month, I go in and I fill out this entire form.
And it helps inform me when I’m doing my batching and creating my own content strategy, what kind of things to be focused on. So. Your action step for this week is to set up your own KPI tracker. If you don’t have one already, go ahead and set it up, add it to your to do list for the first of every single month to go fill it out.
And if you’re like, that sounds great, but you don’t want to set it up yourself, you can steal my KPI tracker. I have a template in my shop for 47. I will link to it in the show notes. And then you can just automatically start filling in your numbers. Now, this week’s book recommendation is our Missing Hearts by Celeste by Celeste.
I don’t know how to say her last name. NG. And this book is heavy. I’ll say that. But man, it is such a good read and such an important read. It, it follows this boy whose mom I believe was the Chinese descent, and his father was not, and so he is mixed, and America has decided that all Chinese people are terrible people, blah blah blah, you know, they’ve done what America tends to do best, and, um, severely oppressed.
Chinese people and this mother disappeared to save her son essentially. Um, and anyways, it’s just, it’s a really great book. It’s really well written. I will link to in the show notes, but um, just, just a warning that it is, it’s such a good read, but it is a heavy read. So just keep that in the back of your mind before you pick it up.
Alright my friend, and with that, I hope that you will go out and uncomplicate your marketing and business.
Thank you so much for joining me here today, friend. You can find this episode’s show notes as well as all of the resources you need to simplify your marketing over at amandawarfield. com. If you liked what you heard here today, be sure to subscribe to the podcast so that you never miss an episode. And if you could take a moment to leave a rating and review, it would truly mean the world to me.
Ratings and reviews are the number one way that you can support a podcast and ensure that it sticks around for many more episodes to come. I’ll see you next time. Now go out and uncomplicate your marketing and business.
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