“If you don’t know where you are going, you’ll end up someplace else.”― Yogi Berra. In the era of Big Data, many companies and businesses think that just because they have data, they’ll make better decisions. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Without a clear direction, data is useless.

In the video below, I share a little more on the importance of measuring results and how to use Databox to get started tracking and measuring your results the right way. Just like you need to walk before you can run, you need to establish baselines before you can determine your true KPIs. Check out the video below and then comment if you have any questions.

Video Transcript:

Hey, what’s up? Welcome to Hack My Growth. In this episode, we’re going to be talking about the importance of measuring our results and how to get started with Databox.

Hey, thanks so much for watching. Today we’re talking about the importance of tracking our results and measuring where we’re at, what’s working, and what’s not working. We’re also talking about a free tool called Databox. It’s a really cool tool that you can use on your computer or mobile device.

Before we get into that, let’s talk a little bit more about why this is really important in the first place. Yogi Berra has this awesome quote. “If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll end up someplace else.” The reason why data is important is it helps us to understand if we’re headed in the right direction. We need to have a destination in mind. Making more money is not a destination. That’s an outcome. That’s a desired outcome. We need to know where we’re going and we need to be able to make sure that we’re heading in that right direction.

And that’s what data can be used for. It can be used as a roadmap and as something that we can use to forecast where we’re headed in the future but also look back to make sure that we’ve made the right decisions.

Measuring your work is important. Especially if you want to be successful. You want to be successful in business? You have to measure what you’re doing.

We have a couple statistics here. 96% of media marketing executives say that they’re deeply committed to leveraging audience data to transform their business into data-centric companies. Companies want to become more data-centric because they know that they can leverage that data to help them make better decisions but also serve their customers better.

Now, I know there’s been a lot of ups and downs with data over the last year, especially with the misuse of data. But if we do it the right way, we can actually deliver a really good customer experience and we can help make sure that we’re headed in the right direction ourselves.

60% of B2B marketers attribute sales increases of 11-50% to marketing analytics. This basically means that by tracking analytics, we’ve been able to increase our sales. Because again, it’s going to give us some indication if we’re headed in the right area where we can invest more money and more time. Make sure that we’re getting the right things done at the right time.

But here’s the kicker. Only about 5% of businesses … (Maybe a little bit more now since this statistic is about a year, year and a half old), Business leaders say they are extremely confident that internal teams have the right skills and experience to support data-driven initiatives. The problem is, understanding data is hard. It’s hard to get started. It’s hard to know what to track. A lot of times we’re just tracking a number of different performance indicators, but we’re not really sure what are KPIs are, those key performance indicators.

And when you’re getting started, the important thing is to set it up to make sure that you’re tracking the right things so that you can get a good baseline. And this is where having the right tools can be very helpful and really drives your value as an employee up. It will also help you make better decisions. Maybe you’re a start-up or a small business owner and you want to start using data. Getting started can be very, very overwhelming. And that’s where a good tool can come into play.

We are going to be talking about what we can use to leverage data in a better way. And that’s going to be with a tool called Databox. So Databox basically pulls your data into one place so you can track your performance and discover insights in real time. Databox is a very cool tool and works with a number of different data sources. As you can see, we’re a HubSpot gold partner. We’re a paid Databox premium partner and we’re also Google Analytics certified.

We can connect all these different sources into Databox, and I share that not to toot our own horn but to show we have all of these tools that we have access to, but by using Databox, I can pool them all into one place and help make better decisions. Not just for myself, but for my customers as well.

I’m going to show you how to get started for free. Alright, let’s take a look at Databox. Databox has a number of different tiers, but you can get started for free and that’s what I would recommend. If you’ve never used an analytics tool before, a data tool before, this is a great place to get started.

It’s really easy to sign up. You just click free signup. Here, you can sign up with your Google ID or you can sign up for your own account with your customized information. I already have an account, so I’m going to go ahead and sign on.

With your free account, you’re allowed to have three different data sources with three different boards. Each one of these is considered a data board, and you can have up to three sources. What I recommend is tying in Google Analytics, Google search console and then let’s say you’ve got HubSpot free. That’s another great free tool. You can tie that into here and have all of your information on one board.

Now, you may be looking at this and thinking, “Oh my gosh, there’s so much data. There’s so many different things that I can be doing.” And you’re right. And if you start from that perspective, you’re going to get lost. A really great place to start is up here in the templates section. They have pre-built templates to help you get started. And one of the things I highly recommend is just trying some of these ones that will start laying out your metrics for you. Preview, right? Check it out. See what it looks like.

This is a Google Analytics dashboard. You can look at the number of users, the number of sessions you have, what people are doing on those sessions, what are the top sources, and what are your top organic keywords. And you can even write some little notes in here and share it with your team so they can start to see what’s going on.

This can be set up in a matter of minutes, where you can just plug in your sources, connect them and get going. It’s pretty easy to get started with that, too. They have something called the data manager. Now, as you can see, I’ve got a number of different data sources connected. To create a new connection, you just hit new connection. You click on what you want to connect. It’s going to pop the connector box open. You type in your credentials. You can sync it to your account. You allow Databox to have access to that account, and then you pick the source you have.

For me, I’ve got a number of different analytics accounts. You’re probably not going to have as many as me, but you can go and sync up that data account. Now all of that’s going to be available to you. And again, you don’t have to try to make these boards up. You can just choose one from the templates section. It allows you to see things very quickly and very clearly.

Now, what I really like about Databox is the goal section. Here, you can start to set some entry-level goals. You can set high-level goals. You can set really granular goals. So we’re tracking things like sessions, new contacts, average rank. We’re checking our net income. We’re doing a lot of different things here in order to make sure that we’re hitting the right marks. And Databox is going to send me alerts and let me know if we’re in the right place or we’re not in the right place. If we’re trending in the right area or if we’re not. It’s very helpful to start to understand where we’re at and where we want to be. If we’re under our goal, why? Why are we falling behind our goal? What can we do to get there?

And this is where you start to make data-driven decisions. If you’re just looking at your analytics and looking if it goes up or down, you’re not really making data-driven decisions. You’re just monitoring your data. Once you start attaching your data to goals, that’s when you can start to make better business decisions.

So, for my traffic, right? We’re down 12.6% of our goal we want to hit this month. We’re trending a little bit below that goal line. So what do I need to do? Do I need to create more content? Do we need to spend some money on ads? Do I need to send an email blast? What can I do now to help trend in the right direction? I can use the data sources that I’ve got here. I can look back and see what source of traffic is bringing in the most amount of return and we invest more time in that area.

Now, I went ahead and built some custom boards out, and I can see different things for my SEO or for my Google Analytics. What if I pull into my Google Analytics dashboard that we’ve built out? I can go back here and say, “Okay, organic traffic is doing really well. We don’t have a lot of traffic from email. Maybe we could spend some time creating some more emails and see if we can’t drive up the users and viewers from email this month.”

Those are the different types of things that we can do in order to ensure that we’re hitting our goals. Again, all of these dashboards only took a little bit to set up, and these are custom-built. But using the templates tool, attaching your data sources and then starting to lay some goals down will help you get started at least understanding where you’re at with website traffic or sales.

Again, when you’re getting started, you need a baseline. You need to know where you’re at and then you can start to make goals based off of where you want to go. And again, this tool will help track that for you. It’s going to give you highlights over here. Are you on track to hit your goals? Are you behind on your goals? What are the things that are holding you back? And now you can become a data-centric company.

And if you want more sources, you can upgrade. It’s a really reasonable tool when it comes to dashboarding tools or BI tools. This is one of the tools that are really, really helpful to smaller businesses and people who want to get started using data but maybe don’t have a data science degree.

My recommendation is, take some time. Build a free account with Databox. Start playing around with some of the templates and tools. Connect some of your data sources, and then set up some notifications. Notifications can give you weekly or data scorecards. “Hey, this is what you did today. Hey, this is what you did this week.” It allows you to have a heartbeat on your business.

You can also set alerts if you’re not going to hit certain things, saying, “Hey, you’re not going to hit your duration goal this month.” And then you can come back in and you’re on top of it and able to use your data.

Open your free account, connect a couple data sources and see what you can’t do with it. If you’ve got any questions, please comment below. We would love to help you out. Like I said, we are a premier partner with Databox, so we can answer most of your questions for you. If not, we can definitely point you in the right direction. This is going to be a powerful tool to help you understand where your business is and help you get to where you want to be.

Like I said, any questions, please comment below. Please hit subscribe if you liked this video. We’ve got a lot of other videos, not just on tracking and measurement but also on SEO and other marketing things that you can do to grow your business online. Until next time, Happy Marketing.