share your business statistic fetish

[cliffski]

You know what I mean... its one of the inevitable parts of running your own one-man online business. You can analyse your downloads, your sales, your conversion rate, your profitability, number of site visits, page hits, aborted downloads...
You could probably spend an hour a day just analysing pie charts and different ways to evaluate this months 3 sales and 127 downloads
I get a big buzz adrenaline wise when I get a sales notification. Its almost like a drug And I probably check my monthly sales reports WAY too often. Am I alone? tell me I'm not!
My favorite statistical fetish is the plimus "month to date daily income" its practically my homepage.
I know... I'm sad.

[lakibuk]

Yes, you are sad. But you are not alone...

[patrox]

Tell me you don't check your email every 30 seconds

pat.

[princec]

Every few days when I get a sale a warm spot crosses my heart and it cheers me up massively Looking at the charts makes me miserable again

Cas

[yanuart]

my suggestion is... stop watching ur sales charts or any reports.. at least do it monthly/weekly/daily (a.k.a once a day) unless you're really have to.

Looking at it/them won't change anything , I know it's hard, for the first few months I spent my times checking my stats on hourly basis until I realize that I've got better things to do and actually now the stats won't reveal anything I don't know allready.

[Sirrus]

Anyone have a good download tracker?

I used StatCounter.com for all web stats but need a solid way to track DLs.

[ggambett]

I get a big buzz adrenaline wise when I get a sales notification. Its almost like a drug And I probably check my monthly sales reports WAY too often. Am I alone? tell me I'm not!
My favorite statistical fetish is the plimus "month to date daily income" its practically my homepage.
I know... I'm sad.

You're sad but certainly not alone I check email every few minutes and have a spreadsheet that tracks every sale, profit, averages and estimations for the month, open almost always!

A very timely article by our favorite superior being : http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/200...ficient-email/

[Diodor Bitan]

With RegNow there is a 20 - 30 minutes delay between the moment a sale appears in the control panel and the moment the sale e-mail is sent. Well, let's just say I don't usually learn about new sales from emails. I also check the "last week sales" "last month sales" and also the Regnow "http refferers" / Plimus monitor for clicks on the buy now button on my site.

As for a fetish - I love finding orders with the status "confirmation" in my RegNow control panel, and a timestamp of a couple of minutes ago (Confirmation means the customer has entered all information but has yet to press the final buy button to close the sale) I open the order information window for that particular order and refresh it until the status changes to "submitted" - meaning a new sale.

My sad beats up your sad. And I'm going to unplug the internet cable now, because it's the only way I get to actually do some work.

[FlySim]

Hi, my name is J.R. and Im addicted to watching my email for sales. I understand there is a 12 step program available...

[Kai Backman]

What gets measured gets improved. I used to have a nice homepage that had the latest stats on it, but after the database revamp I lost it. In addition to the current stat you might want to track the exponential moving average (trend) for the most important stats. My next goal is to add a cron script for generating nice small charts of the last 100 days ..

[Jack Norton]

From Steve Blog:

Don’t check email haphazardly. You can easily waste 30-60 minutes per day checking email too often. In most cases you should be fine checking your email 3x per day maximum.

wow 30 minutes wasted!
seriously, I think I remember at least 10-12 times that I checked the email just before going to bed (and I had checked it just 3 minutes before) and found a user complaining about his <insert stupid complain here> and saying that if he don't get an answer soon he would have requested a refund.
I must have saved over 200$ just checking the email every 5 minutes... well I just leave open the email client, not a big time waster

[Andy]

I can't imagine how one can build their marketing policy and efforst without checking their sales statistics at least in every five minutes. This is wrong guys - check it often!

Saying a little bit outside of this - we were talking with patrox by year ago and this is still remains the same at least for me - but we still have good advantage: we still get happy from every new sale. And this is not very bad really because we become very positive in such moments.

[Nexic]

Damn I must be weird, I check them only about once every 5 days....

Except of course when I just released a game, then its every 3 minutes.

[lakibuk]

One thing a fellow developer is doing: He is leaving his email client open and everytime a sale comes in there's a cash sound (using an email filter). Pretty thing.

[Gnatinator]

One thing a fellow developer is doing: He is leaving his email client open and everytime a sale comes in there's a cash sound (using an email filter).

Hehe, thats so awesome. I've gotta remember to set that up.

[ManuelFLara]

One thing a fellow developer is doing: He is leaving his email client open and everytime a sale comes in there's a cash sound (using an email filter).

The other day I saw at ThinkGeek this and inmediately thought 'how cool would be to set it up to change its color when a sale is generated.' I'm sure that if you're doing something away from the computer (cooking, watching TV..) and you see that thing changing its color, it makes you feel good instantly

[patrox]

I know one thing most of you are doing
Checking the indy forums every 5 mn for a new post


pat.

[terin]

I think there's a nugget of truth in your scary fetish thread.

Check your tech support e-mail often. Don't watch your sales every minute unless there's a good reason to. DON'T listed to the advice NOT to check your sales.

Check your sales often, I suggest weekly. Make sure you are aware of what is going on in your product. If you check it daily and see a spike in sales or a drop in sales on Day 21 you may use that data unwisely. However, generally speaking, if a week is experiencing unusually high sales and you can't figure out why that means you had BETTER find out what is going on (so you can keep doing it). Weekly is more often than you usually need... again, barring anything crazy like a 1 day ad on Gamespot for 10k.

-Joe

[princec]

Hey, if I only checked weekly, I might miss it! And there's my excuse for a glass of wine down the tubes.

Cas

[arcadetown]

If really want to save some productivity time just stay away from these forums... note to self for 1000th time

[PoV]

Hey, if I only checked weekly, I might miss it! And there's my excuse for a glass of wine down the tubes.

I just hope each glass doesn't cost more than a registration of Puppytron, or if it is, I might have just solved your sales problem, and your drinking problem.

[goodsol]

My favorite stat is checking the last 24 hours sales number on the RegNow page. It's a real time look at the sum of the orders of the last 24 hours. I probably check it 12-15 times a day.

The number can detect problems very quickly, such as a server problem or a RegNow problem. Although usually it is just that RegNow is a little behind completing orders.

As my wife can attest, I'm in a bad mood whenever the number is low.

Beyond that, I'm often running Link ID statistics reports to see how whatever test I'm running at the moment is doing (for those of you who don't use RegNow, RegNow has a linkid parameter you can use in your order URL to tag a link. So you can tell how many people order via a certain link - even tell the difference between different links on the same page. Very useful!).

[Draginol]

The business statistic junkie issue doesn't go away when even when the company has grown.

I've got real time line graphs of our various ecommerce servers. Because of the predictability of sales if we haven't made X by 5pm I tend to get cranky.

[Sharpfish]

One thing a fellow developer is doing: He is leaving his email client open and everytime a sale comes in there's a cash sound (using an email filter). Pretty thing.

haha.. sounds like a good reason to hook up a 50 watt amp to the PC.!!