The Importance Of Custom Reports
You always need to know what is happening and why.
Managing an online store is a hard job: there are plenty of different tasks you need to fulfill each day, and as a result you may end up forgetting to focus on the most important thing — analyzing your business data. Having compiled data on the day-to-day upkeep of your business is extremely valuable when it comes to improving practices and growing, but it’s vital to have this data represented in a way that is easy to understand and share.
That’s why Custom Reports are so critical — they can give you insight and help keep you informed, which is the first step in making any important business decision. Remember, you always need to know what is happening, as well as why things are happening, in order to tackle problems as they arise.
#1 Set Important Metrics
Before you start analysing you have to figure out what you actually need to know by cutting out superfluous information — this will give you a better idea of how much time you’ll need to spend on it. Each metric has its own unique independent characteristics, which dictate how often you need to check on them. The most important metrics to track are:
- Revenue: to keep track of how you are doing from financial point of view
- Orders: check average order value, amount of orders and shipped versus cancelled orders
- Products : the best selling products which will help you to track your stock and see what products are in demand so that you have them when the time comes
- Audience: always keep on top of your conversion rate and what percentage of visits result in a successful order
- Customers : knowing your customers inside and out is invaluable. You need to know what your customers want, how they react, how to arouse their interests, where to find them and which selling channels they prefer
- Marketing Activities: the performance of your active campaigns across all your marketing channels
Choose the metrics you are interested in and combine them to get the correlations that are important for you depending on your type of business. For example if you are interested in your customer structure, you can track your customers, see their revenue, their orders, quantity statistics… and get this information directly to your inbox.
#2 Decide Who & How Often
After you choose the right data you want to receive and analyze, it’s time to decide how often you want to find them in your inbox and who else should receive them. It’s good to receive different kind of reports — some for the overall week overview, others for a monthly overview. It’s also very useful to receive a daily data overview directly to your inbox so you can go over them while drinking your morning coffee, and this will keep you up to date with any changes that might need to your attention.
#3 Learn From Your Data
Once you’ve got your data you have to be able to analyze them properly and learn from them. The more you familiarize yourself with the basic metrics, the faster and easier it will become to look at them on the fly and have all the background information you need at a glance. If you need a guide through the important data, what they’re representing, and how this relates to your business growing, there is a free ebook available which is full of awesome tips and tricks.
Where Do I Get Custom Reports?
When your reports accurately depict metrics that are significant to your business and to you personally, you can then go into your history and compare that data with your other reports — this is an incredible time saver and an invaluable source of information for if and when you decide to expand.
To properly track your campaign performance you can use apps like MonkeyData that are very easy to navigate and provide lot of interesting and useful information about your business — you’ll get all your online and offline sales data in one place, as well as crucial marketing metrics and KPIs.
