Grow With Soul: Ep. 59 Using Data & Numbers In Your Business, and Why I Don't Track My Stats With Kayte Ferris
Today I want to talk about stats and measuring your activity because I know it’s something that a lot of people worry about (i.e., they worry they’re not tracking the right things) and because, and I’m going to drop a bomb here, I basically don’t track any stats in my business. So in this episode, I want to get into what the point of tracking stats in your business is, defining what’s important to track and what isn’t, and also write you a big permission slip to stop worrying.
Here's what we talk about in this episode
Kaytes background into data;
Tracking data is a waste of time;
So many measures are out of your control such as Instagram followers;
Most things you can measure don't make a real difference in your business;
Encourages reactive behaviour;
Checking data can be soul-destroying;
Find the few things that do affect your business and focus on that;
Look at what you will do with the information that you are tracking;
Use data as a tool for problem-solving;
Track what feels good to track;
Track your progress on goals;
There is only one stat that matters, that is the money coming in;
The stats that Kayte tracks
Pin For Later:
Read the episode transcript:
Hello and welcome to episode 59 of Grow With Soul. Today I want to talk about stats and measuring your activity because I know it’s something that a lot of people worry about (i.e., they worry they’re not tracking the right things) and because, and I’m going to drop a bomb here, I basically don’t track any stats in my business. So in this episode I want to get into what the point of tracking stats in your business is, defining what’s important to track and what isn’t, and also write you a big permission slip to stop worrying.
When I started my first marketing job back in 2014, data was everything. It was a time before we knew that Facebook quizzes were stealing your data and when re-targeting ads seemed useful instead of entirely creepy; and in my job we were obsessed with tracking. Everything was tracked in spreadsheets and on whiteboards, and every week and month it would be analysed and discussed. Every week I’d pull data from Google analytics, email providers and sales teams and put it together into a ten slide PowerPoint presentation to give to the rest of the team. Nothing was done without there being a grounding for it in the data, the default response to any new idea was ‘what does the data say?’
All this to say, my marketing experience was grounded in data. I grew up with it. I learned my craft as a marketer in the language of data. For two years it was the only way I knew. Which is what makes it all the more surprising to me that, now I work for myself, I don’t really track anything.
I imagine lots of us who have worked in offices have had to justify or contribute to data in our time, which is probably why feel like it’s something we have to do now. Either way, it’s definitely something that feels ‘proper’ and ‘professional’ and we can’t be taken seriously if we don’t know all our numbers of the top of our heads. Thinking about it, shows like Dragon’s Den or Shark Tank really don’t help with this. I didn’t consciously decide to stop tracking data, and I definitely started my business with a sprawling spreadsheet, but over time it naturally just stopped being important. Here are the reasons why…
First of all, it’s a waste of time
In that first marketing job I was talking about, I’d say I spent about 50% of my time on collecting, formatting and presenting data. There were very often months when I had to prioritise doing my monthly data presentation…over actually marketing the business. When you are the only person doing everything in your business, there is absolutely no way that tracking data is the best use of your time. Let’s say it take an hour a week to go into your Google Analytics, find the relevant stats and put them in a spreadsheet, do the same with MailChimp and Instagram, format them into a pie chart and then tick it off in your planner. You can’t seriously tell me that that hour wouldn’t have been better spent engaging with your customers on social media, creating a piece of content, updating your website copy or answering enquiries. There are just simply more effective things to do with our precious time than track data.
Secondly, so many measures have factors beyond your control
Your Instagram following is a prime example of this. Your Follower number really has nothing to do with you. You can’t say ‘oh I had a dip this week, let me see what I did wrong’ because it’s not a straight correlation between what you did and the dip. Maybe Instagram cleared out some bots, maybe someone deleted their account, maybe someone else is finding your topic triggering, maybe they don’t need your advice any more. The same goes for your email stats. If we put too much store in measures that have multiple factors, we will be chasing our tails trying to affect them when we are only one element. A bit like growing a plant in your garden - whether it’s successful or not depends not just on you, but also the rain, the sun, frosts, animals eating it, the soil, diseases. If you can’t control it, what’s the point in tracking it?
The fact that most things you can measure don’t make an actual difference
Taking Instagram following again, that’s not going to make the biggest impact on your bottom line - I know it’s easy to say and not easy to believe, and of course it makes a difference to have a bigger pool of people to talk to, but that’s the point. It’s a pool of people, not an arbitrary number to track. If those people aren’t doing anything, not commenting or buying, then it is literally a pointless number. If you have 300 or 3000 followers, but you’re getting bookings and making sales, does it matter that you don’t have 30,000? These big numbers look and feel important and they’re easy to see and track, but are they actually doing anything?
The fourth reason: it encourages reactive behaviour
“Oh no, 3% fewer people opened my email I need to change it”, “my web traffic is down by 100 visits, I need to stop what I’m doing and completely overhaul my content strategy”. Data can quickly pull us off track and see a natural blip as something that needs to be tackled right now - and again there are reasons outside of ourselves as to why the blip happened, like it’s the middle of August and people are on holiday, not checking their inbox.
If we chase the data around trying to ‘fix’ it and put our trackers back on an upward trajectory, then we’re not moving forward. We are replacing projects which might open up a whole new income stream to try and stop people unfollowing us (which is a fool’s errand at the best of times).
And finally, tracking data can be really soul-destroying
This is the underlying theme through all the reasons really. In my old job, there was always the weight that the data was what dictated my worth and ability (and yes, that was made explicit by my boss), and being self-employed that goes up a level because our business is so personal. What we don’t need in our businesses, is more reasons to think we can’t do it and tracking data, especially the measures we don’t fully control, does exactly that. A confident, positive you does a better job than one wringing her hands about followers or web traffic.
So all of those reasons combined are you permission slip to change the way you track, or your expectations of yourself with regards to data. I hope it’s piqued your interest and you’re feeling positive about a future, free from the weight of data. However, I know there will be a ‘but what about x’ on your lips, and yes, I’m not saying we have a complete free-for-all. Data can provide important information that we can use to create better products and grow our business more effectively. We just need some more efficient ways of approaching it.
So, instead of tracking all the big numbers and the things you think you ‘should’ track, here are some things to do instead.
Find the few things that really do affect your business
You’ve likely heard the phrase that 80% of your revenue comes from 20% of your activity, and it’s true. Your 20% is the key to unlocking more efficiency and balance in your business. It’s also key to finding what to keep an eye on. Why track your Facebook likes when most of your customers find you through your podcast, or through your Etsy listings? Define your 20% (you’ll probably know this intuitively, or you can ask your customers where they found you) and focus on looking after that and keeping it healthy.
Secondly, think about what you are going to do with this information. So often we track things and just have a spreadsheet full of numbers that we save every week and don’t look at again until the next time we open it to put numbers in. Just like your Instagram following is irrelevant if they’re not doing anything, the numbers you track are irrelevant if you’re not doing anything with them. Quickly you’ll realise there’s not a lot you can do with a lot of things you’re tracking, either because there’s too many factors or it’s not that important to your business or you have more important pro-active things to be doing.
Approach data by thinking of the question you want to ask your business
Use data as a tool for problem solving. So perhaps it’s something like ‘my sales have dropped this month, what reasons can I find that that might have happened?’, or, ‘I want to launch a new product range, what might be a good route to take?’ You can then go and seek the answers you need and take action on them, rather than passively tracking data.
For example, last April I didn’t get any new coaching enquiries. Wondering why that was, I went in search of evidence, and realised that I hadn’t posted on my blog that month, and that therefore web traffic was down. If people didn’t have a reason to come to my website, they weren’t also exploring my offerings and sending enquiries.
Track what feels good to track
This self-employment thing doesn’t have to be self-flagellation! You’re allowed to look at what’s good! Track your progress on goals and projects that you can control - if you’re making a limited run of 200 mugs, track your progress; if you’re writing a book, track your word count; if you’re saving up for a new piece of equipment, track it! Track something you feel positive about so that you can stay motivated and keep going. I like to track quarterly and yearly income goals so that I can see my progress, and also add in something new if I want to give the goal a boost.
Finally, remember that there is only one stat that matters.
In sport you’ll often here commentators reel of the stats someone is feeding them - ‘this team have scored in all of their last 10 games’, ‘even thought they’re losing so-and-so has had 80% possession in this half’ - but they always close with, ‘but there’s only one stat that matters, Clive, and that’s the score’. The same is true with business; the only stat that really matters is the money coming in. You can have 100,000 Instagram followers, a 90% email open rate, a million website visitors - but if there’s no money coming in, it’s not a business.
I know that this may feel uncomfortable or attacking if you’re starting out, or not making consistent income at the moment. I am categorically not saying that you aren’t a proper business, so stay with me and stay positive. I’m saying that those other big numbers don’t make you a business, so you can stop worrying about them, or comparing yourself. What makes you a business is one sale, and then another one later on. So you can stop trying to reach for those huge numbers and feeling like ‘when I get to 10k Instagram followers I can feel like I’ve got a proper business’ - you just need to make one sale. You can have one email subscriber who then books your services, and you’re, quite literally, in business. So don’t get distracted by the trappings, and stay focused on the core of your work.
So what does all of this look like in my business? I have a handful of measures that I track in a spreadsheet, creating little grids which I fill in with colours when I meet a check point. I have a tab where I track my income, my income goal and my outgoings. I also have a tab to track goals, like savings goals I have for the house, offering sales targets and product creation goals (so essentially tracking the progress I make in creating a new product). And that’s it! I actively track just three or 4 goals in a spreadsheet. I always have it open on my computer so I can look at my progress, and I update it whenever I have anything to update it with - I probably check in with it a couple of times a week.
For everything else, I have a ‘keep an eye on it’policy. I keep an eye on podcast downloads every couple of weeks, I keep an eye on Instagram engagement, I keep an eye on email open rates (because these are my 20% activities). By ‘keep an eye’, I mean I look at it for about 10 seconds to make sure there’s nothing drastically good or drastically bad, and then I move on to doing something proactive. If something did markedly better than usual, I’ll spend a little bit of time just digging in to see why that was - was I talking about a topic that was really interesting to people, was the picture particularly like-able, did I chime with something in the zeitgeist? I’ll then note that down to use next time, and get on with what I was doing.
If something did a lot worse than usual, again I’ll take a moment to look at why that might have been - bad timing, the photo not brightly lit enough, no invitation to engage, just an disinteresting topic, more emails going to Junk. If I can do something to fix it I will, otherwise I will jot down my findings to help me be more successful next time, and then I move on to what I was doing. Focusing on my 20%, asking questions of the business, looking for what I can do with the data, and ultimately, not wasting my time and positivity on numbers.
I hope that this episode has helped you to see the numbers in your business differently, and given you some permission to use data on your own terms. As always, there is nothing you have to do, in order to be a business owner. No one is going to come and check up on you to make sure you’re doing it right. The only things you need to do are things that help you to get it done - data is a tool to help you do that, not a piece of homework. So, next time you find yourself freaking out about numbers, remember you’re in charge - is this part of your 20%, will it make a difference to your business and bottom line, what can you do with it or, is it a waste of your time? Then get on and do the work you were put here to do.