You’ve got your online empire or you are growing one, what do you measure and how do you do it?

Excel or open office is the faithful standby. Create your charts and graphs and calculations. However I found when I use excel I don’t look at the numbers as much as I should.

Even when using excel, what do you measure?

Unique visitors?

Conversions?

Subscribers?

Total Site Earnings?

Feed Subscribers?

Indexed pages in google?

Comment count?

What?

The big board

My new way of tracking is a giant poster board I put together that shows my 50 top sites.

I’ve set an earnings goal for each site and the only the board tracks is if the sites met the goal or not.

If no, then I’ll go look at the other stats and trends to determine the problem.

That’s how I’m doing it this month, how are you doing it?

Things Measured Get Better

Not only do I have the goal of trying to improve my sites by tracking, there is also a practical reason, I can see problems better.

Once you get a dozen or a few sites there might be some you dont’ visit for awhile. If you aren’t tracking them somehow, they could be dead and you’d never know it. Recently I deleted a database that 2 sites I didn’t know used the database and the sites died. Woops.

Now that I right that I’m thinking maybe once a month measuring is needed.

Your thoughts

What do you measure and how do you do it? And how often?