There’s an old adage in the marketing game that says “You can’t track what you can’t measure”. Which is a fairly adequate description of success in general: setting milestones, achieving milestones, resetting milestones, and so on. In the age of the NSA, we really are just a collection of data points, and these days it’s easier than ever to track what you’re doing to determine success. In the e-commerce game, there are three real simple metrics:

• Number of visitors to site.
• Percent of visitors who buy.
• Revenue generated.

You can probably tell me a zillion more, but these are foundational.  Your spreadsheet wants to know all of it, but these remain the keys.

Right now, we’re basically zero on all these fronts over at www.brainsarefun.com. Every week, we’ll be posting our income report here, so you can see how, if, and why we grow. The first thing I did today was hook up Google Analytics to this site just to see how it’s bouncing through cyberspace. We did that a while back on www.brainsarefun.com  – and the numbers remain fairly discouraging (about 15 unique visitors a day). Our goal quite simply is to double this within a month and focus on this one metric alone for now.

FYI: to be honest, I’m not a believer of ”You can’t track what you can’t measure”. There are things like happiness and joy – even love – that remain ethereal and magic.Big Data can never fully capture that. But in the e-commerce space – numbers matter.

Throw me a lifeline – give me advice here.