Now that we’ve made The Case for Goal Setting, called out Goal Distractions that Can Get You, and lead you through How to Set Good Goals, we want to help you measure them. You’ve done the hard work by setting measurable goals and now you need to see if that work is paying off or if you need to shift directions to ensure you’re making your budget and resources work hardest for you.
At LŪM Studio, we utilize a combination of tools to measure goals. As you’d expect, how you measure depends on your goal. Today, I’m going to dive into a few of the programs we regularly use to measure. Don’t forget, although, these are our primary tools, there are hundreds of options available.
A Central Place to Track Goals
Above all have a central place where you enter and store your ongoing analytics and measurements. At LŪM, we utilize a proprietary dashboard that we provide our clients monthly or as otherwise determined. This dashboard allows us to break down information in different ways like a designated time-frame to see top-line and detailed data. We can then layer or breakdown the data to see how it affects each other and do our best to identify the most accurate reality in order to make strong recommendations and improvements going forward.
QuickBooks or Other Accounting Systems
Accounting systems are great tools for reviewing and measuring top line goals like growing a company, service, product, or sector. We encourage you to go much further and breakdown the information in your accounting system to understand why things are or aren’t growing. However, this is a great place to start to see where you’re at on those big goals and where you want to drill down.
Individual Program Analytics
Every different tool we utilize including Facebook, Instagram, MailChimp, WordPress, Hootsuite, and many others offer analytics as part of their platforms. Get familiar with these tools, decide what data sets and points you like and value, and which you don’t. Each breaks down and showcases their information differently. Enter information from all of them in one central place so you can layer and compare to identify how you are coming along with goals.
Google Analytics
Our very favorite comprehensive tool is Google Analytics. Google Analytics is free! Sing songs of praise; something in this world is free! On top of being free, it is a powerful tool that provides information that allows you to make implementable changes based on the data provided. Here you can gather data from your website, search engines, users, social platforms, digital ad campaigns and many other sources. In Google Analytics, you can utilize their goal tool to make tracking and analyzing easy on you. Lastly, Google Analytics is one of our favorites because, excluding search data, it’s a third party pulling the information. That just always adds a bit more credibility in our minds. If you only have the will and patience to learn one analytic program, this is it.
Google Console
Google Console is very specific to Google’s Search Engine. However, the data and information provided allows you to see what your existing and potential customers are searching and may help you in deciding what to provide going forward. This provides great insight on your customers needs and problems ultimately allowing you to develop content, solutions and ideas around these topics.
Word of Mouth or Conversation
While each of the above tools should be included in your measurement, so should word of mouth and conversation. Nothing beats hearing where you are winning and where you need improving directly from you customer’s mouth. We also encourage you to participate in social listening. This will help you gather feedback from people who don’t know you are actually listening. Balance out your data and analytics with real conversation and word of mouth.
All of these tools will provide you data and information. Now it’s your responsibility to take the information, put it together and interpret what it means to create insights and recommendations. If you’re successful at doing this, you’re on the right track to meeting your goals.
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