 Hey everyone, welcome to The Journey. Today we're talking about seven ways that you can use Excel to track your KPIs. All right, so first things first, Alex. What is a KPI? It is a key performance indicator. So if you're a business owner, you know, you probably know how important it is to track your performance and we're going to show you which tool to use and how to do that. Well, knowing that money is very important to a small business owner and if you're writing the beginning of your business, you don't want to spend a whole lot of money on some new expensive software. So an oldie but goodie, Excel is a great tool to use to track those. It's a classic. So we're going to actually talk to you a little bit more about how to use Excel and maybe give you some examples of some KPIs you can track. So before we dive in, the first thing you have to do is decide which KPIs you want to track, which ones are most important to your business and actually translate into success for you. And that does make sense. Just to help you out to give you some ideas, we're going to talk about a couple KPIs that you could possibly track. One KPI you can track your social media following. You can have an Excel spreadsheet with a column of all the social media platforms that you're on and then have 12 columns, one for every month of the year and just put in how many followers you have that month. This is also a really great way to see which type of content is working or which platforms are working best. So that way you can focus on that content because it's really engaging and doing well with your customer base. Exactly. And the reason why we bring up followers, honestly, if people are following you, that means that you're interested or you're interested, people are interested in you and if you're relevant. So follower count on your social media platforms. So still again, social media, tracking your engagement on there, post engagement, right? Exactly. So you can also track which months are doing better, right? So once you create that spreadsheet, you see which months, especially if you're a seasonal business, it's really important to see when your engagement is going up. So you're getting more comments, you know, more likes, more followers. And then it's really important to know when you say seasonal, think of businesses that rely on college students. During the summer months, you may not have that many college students there and your vicinity. So if you're tracking this over a year, remember thinking about long term, you can look this time next year, you'll know, oh, in the summer, it's going to be a little light. Exactly. The spring time, maybe a quarter, three months prior, I can do some things to jumpstart my social media. So it's good to have that historical data so you can plan accordingly. The next metric that you can track is keeping record of your email subscriber list and how many people are signing up for your emails. Because these are people who are choosing to do business with you, they want to hear from you. If you're signing up for an email list, you want to hear from that business, right? You're not going to sign up for an email list that you don't want to get their emails. So you can really leverage that as a business owner. If you're a business that relies on repeat customers, email list, that's worth its weight in gold. You want to make sure that you're keeping track of who's continuing to stay on your list so that you can continue to keep them engaged and have them keep you top of mind. So how to do this is you create a spreadsheet and not only are you tracking name, their email, and when they signed up for your email list, but also which opt-in they chose. So that's a really great way to see which opt-in form is performing better for you. And if you would like to have more information on that, we actually did a video on that. Just click over here. Another metric that you can track is ad performance. If you're running ads, it's no point of putting money into something that's not working. So you want to make sure that you're tracking certain things on ads to make sure it's beneficial and a good return on your investment. Yeah, there's no point in spending wasted money. So this is a really great way to use and track Facebook boosting, for example. So if you see really how much reach it's getting, how many impressions that boosted post is getting, you know exactly how beneficial it is and what your return on investment is. Exactly. So just as Alex said, you want to track impressions with some of your ads. Facebook boosting is one example, but you can also track your click-through rate. How many people are actually clicking on that ad divided by how many times it's been seen? It's important. Not only should you just be seen, but you want to be chosen. Exactly. That's important. You want to see those numbers of not only people are seeing this, but it's actually converting into revenue for you. The next thing you can track is pretty simple. You know, it's logging the number of sales per customer. So essentially just seeing which products are selling and tracking that inventory. And it's important to know which one of your products is your best seller. So you know how many of those you want in regards to the others. In the past, I've bought different items from Bath & Body Works for my family members. Such a great store. Of course. Cucumber Melon was one of the biggest selling ones, and I know my mom, she loved it. So if you had an item like that that you know is very popular, especially around certain seasons, you want to be stocked very well for it to match the demand that you're going to have for it. Exactly. So in fall, right? The pumpkin spiced everything is really important, right? So those are going to track really well, and that way you know what to order and when. Another metric you can track is your conversion rate. You want to know how many people have seen your business and then has taken a specific action, say sign up for a certain program or actually bought from you. It's good to know that you're actually having people not only interested, but as we said earlier, choosing you. Another option is to track your blog post performance. So you can actually pair that with your Google Analytics insights and actually see the numbers firsthand for yourself. And if you're like me, you want to make sure what you're doing makes sense. You can even track which subjects in your blog posts are performing better than others, and then you know where to focus your time. Another metric you can track, visit to your website. It's really simple. Google Analytics, you can actually track month by month how many visitors you're getting, which is also important to know. So there are some ways that you can track those key performance indicators for your business so that not only do you know how well you're currently doing, but also how close you are to reaching those goals that you want to achieve. Thanks so much for watching. Be sure to like, comment, and subscribe to our videos and make sure that you ring the bell so you're the first to know when we have new content coming out. This is The Journey. See you next time.