Create a 'Business Dashboard' to Track Your Goals & Progress
After setting your annual goals, have you set up systems for tracking your progress and staying on the right path?
This is where a ‘Business Dashboard’ comes in; somewhere you can keep all key statistics and information up to date and handy, either using a spreadsheet or Google Doc, or my preferred method, Trello. Trello is a free project management tool I've spoken about before a LOT before, but it feels like the perfect place to create something like this.
PS. You can listen to the Podcast version of the blog post here too!
What is a 'Business Dashboard'?
It's basically a place where you can see all of your 'vital' numbers all on one page in a quick & easy way. In the book 'Traction' by Gino Wickman*, he calls it a 'Scorecard', and you can really call it anything you want!
However, it shouldn't show every single number that you can possibly track in your business though. It should really be just your 'vital' metrics and 'Key Performance Indicators' related to your yearly or quarterly goals, that show a quick glance of the health of your business.
The whole point of having this dashboard is set up is so that you can quickly have access to what is going on your business, because in the day to day runnings of being a solo business owner, it can be easy stray off the path of the goals we’ve set, and by the time we look up to see where we are it can turn out we've been going in the wrong direction for far too long.
This is why at the very least, a monthly check in with these numbers is needed to keep you on the right path.
What types of numbers should you include in your dashboard?
Again, it totally depends on the goals that you've set for your business at the beginning of the year, or for each quarter. And of course, it goes without saying that the only way this works is if the goals you have set are SMART goals (Specfic Measureable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound).
So an example might be that you want to increase your monthly revenue to £5000 per month by December 2020. Therefore in your dashboard you'd make a note of your goal, and for each month you’d add in what revenue you've actually achieved so you can see if it's getting closer to that goal.
Or maybe it was to increase revenue by a certain %, in which case you would work out your % growth of revenue by looking at last month's and this month's, and see how close you are to your target %.
One of my more general goals for this year is to grow my audience, and more specifically, to increase my email list subscribers, my Instagram engagement, and my website traffic. So in my Business dashboard I would add all of these numbers to start tracking.
Or yours might not be so much for growth, but for increasing conversions of the audience and traffic you already have - so instead you might like to write down website conversion rates, or click throughs on emails, or cost per conversions from Facebook adverts etc. It really depends what your focuses are for the year!
Monthly evaluations
As well as keeping your main Dashboard up to date each month, you can also spend some time evaluating the key metrics too, either on the same Board or in a separate space. So for example, if I'm tracking engagement on Instagram, I like to take some time to look through my Insights on my Instagram Business account, and take a look at what posts and Stories have performed best through the month in terms of comments, saves, replies or shares, for example. I'll make a note of what's worked best and what hasn't worked so well, so that I can tweak my strategy moving forward and do more of what's working.
You could also do this with any other social media, or even your email newsletter too - making a note of which email headlines were getting the most opens and why, or which types of emails were getting the most click-throughs or conversions.
You can easily attached screenshots and write comments in each card so that you can refer back to the best performing posts in the future.
Website data
When it comes to your website, you can also create data dashboards within Google Analytics as well. I've written a blog post about how to do this, and on this you can show things like traffic numbers per month, which pages or blog posts have been most popular this month, bounce rate and conversions. This is also a good thing to take a look at each month to see if you're on track and also to make any adjustments to your marketing strategy.
You can also easily use the Google Analytics template I’ve set up, rather than start from scratch.
Overall I personally like to set aside a couple of hours at the end of each month to go through these analytics and update my Dashboard, and I usually do this on the same day as I do my accounts and bookkeeping each month. It's a great habit to get into if you're serious about staying inline with your goals and targets throughout the year!
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