Become a Data Genius: Track Everything in Your Small Business

As someone that has worked for small technology-based businesses for years, I've come to learn some of the best habits of small business geniuses. While most business owners are unique and every business is different, there is one very important trait that is shared by the most successful ones: they track everything.

Tracking is one of the key pillars of a successful business. Without tracking, the business owner simply cannot know what works and what does not. It is also difficult to see where the inefficiencies are and how they can be improved upon.

The best way to become a data genius is to get into the habit of tracking everything when it comes to your business, and that includes the website, customers, and employees.

Since my experience mainly covers online and web businesses, most of the tips in this article will be relevant to those types of businesses. However, they can be modified and applied to just about any business.

Customer and Employee Tracking

When it comes to tracking, you will need to make sure you are tracking customers, potential customers, and employees. Your customers are the reason why your business exists and your employees are the reason why your business can fulfill your customers' demands.

Customer Relationships

It is crucial for every good business owner to have a solid customer relationship management (CRM) and tracking tool. That includes tracking everything from lead acquisition to customer retention.

Many aspects of customer tracking will be covered in the section below covering website tracking. But, for now, we can go over how to best manage the customers and leads that you receive.

One of the most important software your business will need is the CRM software. Here are some of the best CRM solutions I would recommend:

Salesforce – The clear industry leader, Salesforce has everything your business needs including sales management, service management, and marketing management. It has just about all the features you will ever need. The only caveat is that it can get pricey fast; however, the company has a limited-feature starter package that's quite affordable.

Infusionsoft – A great alternative to Salesforce is Infusionsoft. Infusionsoft is feature packed and surprisingly versatile CRM solution. It includes many of the same features Salesforce does, but with a price tag that's typically lower.

Pipedrive – Although Pipedrive is mainly a sales pipeline tool that helps manage your customer acquisition process, it has some of the most important features a CRM tool should have: ways to organize contacts, categorizeleads, and manage customer meetings. If your business is just starting out and doesn't have a big budget, then a smaller CRM such as Pipedrive might be all you need for now.

Employee Task and Goal Tracking

The next aspect of tracking is employee task and project management. The only way to ensure your employees are doing their job and work is getting done on time is to have a way to manage all of the tasks and projects that need to be done.

Whether your employees are full-time employees, freelancers, or contractors, you will always need a way to measure their work and find any inefficiencies or wasteful spending that may be occurring.

Two great tools for this are Wrike and Basecamp.

Wrike – Wrike is a feature-packed project and task management tool that is free to use for up to 5 users. For more advanced features, I would definitely recommend upgrading to one of the company's paid plans, but it is helpful to be able to try out it for free first to see if your business can benefit from it.

Basecamp – Even though I have not used Basecamp in a while, it is still one of my favorite project management tools. The user interface is simple and effective and it makes getting tasks done much easier. Like Wrike, Basecamp also has a free account so you can try it before you buy it.

Website Tracking

This section deals with tracking everything on your website. That includes tracking your SEO keyword positions, website phone calls, and traffic on your website.

SEO Tracking

Although many people will disagree with the need for a keyword rank tracker software solution, I've found it to be very important, especially if you have the ability to receive notifications so that you will know when your keyword ranks change.

How do you know if your SEO efforts are working if you don't know how your keywords track over time? You don't need anything fancy or expensive such as Moz-I think a simple and relatively inexpensive keyword tracking tool will suffice.

I've used many different SEO software tools that have keyword-tracking ability, but my two favorites are IntelliSerp and SerpFox.

IntelliSerp – This is the keyword-tracking software that I've used most recently. It is pretty cheap and comes with just enough features that I need. It tracks keywords multiple times per day and allows me to set up both email and text notifications when ranks change. It also has a neat feature where I can request a keyword update “On Demand.” In other words, I can do it any time I please. It also has a “Keyword Insights” feature, which allows me to find other similar keywords to try to rank for.

Serpfox – Serpfox is another nifty keyword-tracking software tool I have used for many years. Although I no longer use it, it has served me well in the past. It is simple, fast, and easy to use. Although its website feels a bit outdated right now, the software behind it is pretty solid and reliable. The tool also has limited reporting functionality that I have never used, but if you have clients that need reporting features, then perhaps you could utilize that.

Phone Tracking

I have preached about phone-call tracking for years and unfortunately you'll have to listen to me preach about it again. If you're not tracking phone calls on your website, that means you don't know anything about the customers that call you. How did they find your website? Did they come from paid search, free search, social media, referrals, etc.?

All of these questions can be answered by simply implementing a phone call tracking software. The great one I've used in the past is CallRail, but Mongoose Mentrics has served me well in the past as well.

CallRail – CallRail is in my opinion a clear leader in call-tracking software. Implementing its solution on your website is as simple as placing one short JavaScript snippet at the bottom of your pages. The best part is that it can integrate beautifully with Google Analytics to provide your GA account with all the phone call tracked features.

Mongoose Metrics (Dialog Tech) – Mongoose Metrics is now known as Dialog Tech, and although I have not used their services for a few years, it was great before. The company's call tracking was a bit harder to implement than CallRail's, but the results were almost the same.

Split Testing

Split testing your landing pages is one of the best ways you can increase your conversion rates, lower your bounce rates, and get more clients to sign up. If you haven't been doing split testing before, it is time to start, especially if your business is web-based and relies heavily on your website.

The three most popular software tools for split testing are Optimizely, Visual Website Optimizer, and Unbounce, with the latter being a bit different than the first two.

Optimizely – What's really amazing about Optimizely is its easy-to-use web interface. It empowers people who aren't coders or programmers to make variations to the landing pages quickly. As someone who primarily focused on design and development, it was refreshing to not have marketers relying on me for every little change.

Visual Website Optimizer – I can't really say that Visual Website Optimizer (VWO) is better or worse than Optimizely. But I have run into issues with VWO in the past that Optimizely was able to take care of more easily. Since it has been a few years, I would hope that VWO has fixed most of those bugs and now competes with Optimizely quite well.

Unbounce – Unbounce is different than Optimizely and VWO in that it allows you to create pages from scratch. It is essentially a weird mix of web page builder, web hosting, and split testing. Although it is not a preference of designers and developers, it is certainly becoming more popular because just about anyone can use it. The tool's WYSIWYG interface is easy to use and packed with features.

Traffic

And finally we have traffic tracking, otherwise simply referred to as website analytics. I saved this section for the end because I'm hoping that the majority of business owners already have traffic tracking in place (although I suspect many do not).

Ever since Google Analytics became publically available, it has made setting up website analytics effortless. That means business owners have NO reason or excuse not to have analytics on their website.

Google Analytics – Google Analytics is the king in this industry. It is free for up to 10 million hits per month per account. As you can imagine, that is a large number of hits, which covers the majority of small businesses. Google Analytics is so featured-packed that it's really no use listing them all here, but some of my favorite ones include goal tracking and funnel visualization.

Woopra – It is hard to compete with Google Analytics and that's why I won't say that Woopra does. But Woopra is sort of in a league of its own. It tracks customers on an individual basis and if they fill out a form on your website, you can feed that information directly to Woopra for even more insights. For example, if you have a budget field on your form, you can categorize clients in Woopra by budget and see where they're from, what pages they visited on your website, and much more. Although you can do similar things in Google Analytics, it is much harder and messier and it's simply not what Google Analytics is made for.

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