Goal tracking for online business

Every business's primary goal is to make money, which is trivial. Making money is a S.M.A.R.T goal. It's Specific (make money), Measurable (how much I made), Achievable (businesses make money), Relevant (That is the purpose of a business), and Time-bound (per week, per month, per year). It's also easy to track money. Just look at the bank account and see.

So why in the day to day you shouldn't track how much money you make? The simple answer is it's too hard to correlate the actions you do in your day-to-day and the amount of money you make. In marketing, for example, it's hard to understand how much money you get from a single call with a prospect.

What goals to track

The funnel of every online business is similar. Customers somehow will go into your product's payment page and pay for your offer. The journey inside the funnel will be different in every business. The first step is to map what other metrics in your business affect the bottom line, making money.

It doesn't matter if you have content for free and you are selling the time of the content consumers to others by sponsorships or ads or whether you have an online course that you are having. In all cases, you have a funnel and want to improve it. Improving that funnel will significantly affect the amount of money you are making.

You should identify where in the funnel you are stuck. It might be at the top of the funnel as you can't drive enough visitors to your product page. It could be in passing the payment wall. After identifying that area, set a goal to improve it. If you do a good job, you will change the goal later to address other bottlenecks in your funnel.

What to do with those goals

After choosing your goals, you probably have some ideas for tackling them. Break down the goals into specific milestones and actions, and you will track the effectiveness of those milestones and activities to move the needle of the goal's progress.

For example, the funnel bottleneck is getting more exposure to your social network posts. Prospects move to the product page from your social network account at the top of the funnel. The milestone could be getting 100 views on every post you make, and the actions will be to increase the number of followers, so more people are exposed to your posts.

You must remember that this is just a tactic. You assume increasing your followers will result in more payments you get. If you're right, it's excellent. You are very focused on what to do in your day-to-day.

How to track the goals

You want to track the progress to verify whether your tactic is sound. You don't want to spend six months on the wrong path. Tracking the effect of the actions and milestones on the goal's progress will allow you to gain confidence in your activities in the direction you choose or to minimize time waste.

Every week go over the relevant metrics and write down how did you progress this week, think about the time left for the goal's deadline that is set and try to estimate if you will achieve this goal or not.

You can do it with a pen and paper notebook and gain all the effects of tracking the goal. You can also use a goal-tracking app. With apps, you will see charts that will help you realize fast trends, and you will also be able to integrate without online tools that you are already using.

Summary

The purpose of each business is to make money, but it's hard to understand how your day-to-day activities affect this goal and what you should focus on.

Every online business has a funnel of potential users from the first exposure to the payment. The main goal is to improve this funnel, identify bottlenecks and set a goal to eliminate them.

Break down those goals into milestones and actions and measure the effectiveness of those on the goal's progress. You can do it with pen and paper or using dedicated goal-tracking software for online business.