Introduction
You’re a business owner, so you know that the key to success is in the numbers. Numbers, whether they’re revenue or sales numbers, are crucial to your success. In fact, some people say that it’s not even possible to run a successful business without analyzing data and making adjustments based on those findings. Here are five key numbers that every small-business owner should have on his or her radar when looking at their company’s performance.
Website Traffic
Whether you’re an online business owner or not, website traffic is most likely one of the most critical numbers in your company. It can make or break your business—if no one visits your site, there will be no opportunity to sell products or services. There are many ways to measure traffic, and each method tells a different story about how users interact with your site.
Two measurements are important for understanding user behavior: bounce rate and conversion rate. Bounce rate measures how many people leave a website after visiting only one page (the homepage). A high bounce rate suggests that visitors weren’t satisfied with what they saw on the homepage and quickly exited before viewing any other pages on the site. A low bounce rate means that users spent time exploring different parts of your site before leaving again—this means they were engaged by what they found! If you want more people to stay around after visiting just once, try creating a clear call-to-action on each page of your website–and don’t forget about social media profiles too!
Conversion rates measure how often visitors convert into customers or leads by completing an action such as signing up for a newsletter subscription, making an online purchase, filling out contact information forms, etc. A higher conversion rate means better service delivery because it indicates more people are receiving something valuable from interacting with us! To improve this metric, keep track of which links/images/videos perform best to know where our efforts should be focused next time (no pun intended 🙂 ).
Number of Visitors to your site
Website traffic is one of the more difficult metrics to improve because it’s largely out of your control. The best you can do is optimize your site so that it’s easier for people to find and improve its ranking on search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo!
You can also look into paid advertising on social media sites or elsewhere online. This will boost your website traffic in the short term but might not be sustainable because it costs money to keep up with this strategy over time.
Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is the percentage of users who visit only one page on your website. It’s often considered a leading indicator for website engagement and can be used to measure the effectiveness of your content. If visitors are not engaging with your content, it could mean that they find it too difficult to use or confusing—or maybe even boring!
If you see that visitors are leaving after visiting only a few pages on your site, this may indicate that there is something wrong with how you’ve designed those pages: perhaps they’re too long or include too much information. Creating effective landing pages will help keep people from bouncing off immediately after landing on your page.
Conversion
Conversion is the measure of the effectiveness of your marketing and sales efforts. It’s important to understand what it is and how to improve it. This can be done by looking at all the data available on your website, including:
- Number of people who have converted (signing up for a newsletter or buying an item)
- Average conversion rate for each campaign
- Conversion rate for specific pages
Profit and Loss statement
The profit and loss statement is a financial statement that shows the revenue and expenses for a period of time, usually at the end of an accounting period. It can be prepared manually or using software. The format of a P&L statement varies according to the accounting method you have selected, but it’s generally broken down into three sections:
- Summary section – This section summarizes the primary information about your business (such as sales revenue and expenses).
- Detail section – This section contains detailed information about each item in your summary.
- Additional schedules – You may need more detail than what fits on one report if you compare different periods or want to break down certain categories more specifically.
Profit Margin
Profit margin is the difference between revenue and expenses.
It’s a measure of profitability, the most important number for business owners.
The profit margin is an essential metric for investors as well.
These are the numbers that will make or break your business
You need to know how much money you are making, what your customer’s lifetime value is, and how much it costs you to acquire a new customer. These numbers will tell you if your business is profitable or not.
You need to know how many people are visiting your site, where they come from, why they visit and what they do when they get there. You also want to know if any traffic is converting into customers.
If someone visits your website but doesn’t buy anything or sign up for an email list, you have wasted their time because they could have easily gone elsewhere instead of spending time on your site. If this happens too often, then it could be damaging for your business because people won’t think that visiting your site is worth their time, so perhaps next time around, when someone needs something similar, then maybe they won’t choose yours as an option anymore because it has already failed them once before with no results whatsoever so now why would anyone try again?
Conclusion
Now that you know the most critical business numbers, it’s time to start tracking them. You may have heard that some of these are hard to measure, but don’t worry—there are plenty of tools for doing so. If you’re looking for something simple and free, we recommend using Google Analytics. It can give you an overview of how many visitors are coming to your site each day or week (and where they’re coming from), as well as how engaged they are once there; if they bounce away immediately after landing on one page without interacting with anything else then chances are they just weren’t interested enough in what was being offered!
