Goals Reports: How to Track Your Progress Automatically
Hit your next business milestone
Have trouble setting and tracking goals for your business or yourself? And what if you have thousands of data points coming from multiple data sources?
At Statsbot, we believe that Artificial Intelligence can change the way people work with data. At first, we saved analysts from tedious and boring work — gathering data from numerous analytics platforms and sharing insights with teammates.
Today, we’re excited to release a new milestone in our product development — Goals. Now Statsbot can show goals alongside with your current results, notify teams right in Slack when something goes wrong and of course, when you reach your goals.
With Goals Statsbot processes your data, builds a machine learning model, tests metrics and then sends the results in Slack.
This job would take an analyst several hours, but our bot does it in several seconds.
By setting precise and clear goals, you and your team will have a compass guiding your decisions. By tracking your progress in real time, you will immediately know how your activities correlate to your aims, and will be able to adapt quickly.
How do I set up a new goal?
You can set up Goals in your personal account.
1. At first, you need to choose which integration/data source you’d like to set up goals for.
2. The Metric Menu includes the metrics which were set up in a specific analytics integration earlier — from this you can choose the metric you want to monitor (we suggest the exciting ones).
Optionally, you can add a segment to your metrics. For example, if the metric is new users, the segments could be new users by source or new users by country.
3. Now you’re ready to set up your goal value, absolute or percentage.
- An absolute goal value for new users could be, for example, 10 000 new users.
- A percentage goal value for new users could be 10% — meaning you need to grow by 10% compared to the previous period.
4. Select a time range for your goal — monthly or weekly.
5. You’re almost done! All that remains is to name your Goal as it will display in Statsbot and choose which channel Statsbot should send your data to.
What is a Goal Report?
Goals represent data from your business plan (green line) versus your actual, current results (blue line). Users are provided with information displaying the percentage of the goal completed — current value/goal rate.
A green dashed line is an optimal way of your growth according to your previous data — considering seasonal and other changes. The last value of this green line is your goal value at the end of your chosen time range.
A solid blue line shows your current progress and ends at the current value.
A blue dashed line is Statsbot’s prediction based on statistics and machine learning analysis. The last value of this line is the expected value for the end of your chosen time range.
On these graphs, you can see two gaps between strategy and real-time data. The first one is in your current position and the second gap is your position at the end of the range. These are the key markers which will show whether you’re on or off track.
How to manage Goals?
You can manage Goals only in your personal account.
Use /statsbot-goal slash command or `@statsbot goals` command to see your goals in Slack or just type the name of your goal.
It’s better not to name your goals the same as your metrics. Imagine, you have a goal called `new users` and a metric `new users`. In this case, Statsbot will recognize the command `new users` as a request for a metric. If this is the case, you would need to use `goal new users` command to see your goal report in Slack.
Goals notifications
Statsbot continuously analyzes your data and makes predictions, so it’s important to get the most out of this data by paying attention to Statsbot’s notifications about your progress.
There are three types of notifications for Goals:
- By default, Statsbot sends Goal Reports every morning at 9 am, but users can change this setting to their liking.
- Statsbot notifies when your data is off track so much so that you will not reach your target.
- You’ll receive a notification with congrats, when you achieve your goal earlier than planned.
What are you waiting for? Get to it and and track your goals!
