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Are you better than yesterday? by Dan

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Running a site as part of your day to day business can easily be forgotten. How important is checking and updating your site against some of the more /official/ or /traditional/ elements of business admin?

For a business whose website is an integral, or sole, piece of the marketing plan, this isn’t good enough. Clients ask us how they should run their site, what they should be doing and how they should measure success. There is a long answer to this, for another day, but we can keep it simple for our clients by remembering one simple mantra:

“Are you better than yesterday?”

Being better than yesterday is important for so many reasons. It ensures growth, it keeps one eye on the metrics (can you tell me your unique visitors for yesterday?), it promotes review of your site, and asks the question of how to make it better.

This process needn’t take long – it’s a case of setting up a repeatable process and set of tools to ensure your seeing, and acting on the most important pieces.

Here’s three top tips for keeping yourself on the ball:

1. Use an anlytics app for your phone or dashboard that makes it easy to get a snapshot of data. We use ego for the iPhone, and it’s great for a once a day look at the key numbers.

2. Limit yourself to 5 key measures; this could be uniques visits, twitter followers, adwords performance, sales conversions, diggs, or anything that is a KPI of your business, the key thing is don’t get lost in too many numbers, and make sure they are easy to see. If you have an online business, make sure you add some developer time in to make a tool that allows you to see signup growth across your plans, and to monitor usage.

3. Do it, and do it often. It’s amazing how seeing these numbers EVERY DAY can inspire you to new marketing ideas. You will be in touch with your online marketing, and your ideas for promoting your business or service will flow much more readily. You will probably increase the growth of the things you are measuring just by being on top of things.

Each of these things can take no more than 10mins a day – if you see something that needs more time, add it to your to-do list and act on it as part of your daily tasks, but set aside this time every day to review, measure, understand and maybe you will be better than yesterday.

Got a great tool for tracking and reporting your performance, or a neat trick? Drop a comment in and let us know…

Dan posted this at 3:50 pm on 01/09/09