As we head into 2025, it is crucial to harness the power of data to streamline and enhance your business strategies. In this episode, Ally Anderson joins us again on the podcast to discuss the art of tracking vital metrics to drive your business growth and success. Whether you’re a photographer, digital marketer, or any creative entrepreneur, understanding which numbers to track can significantly influence your path for the year ahead.
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Guest Bio:
Ally is a data-backed marketing consultant who helps entrepreneurs who don’t have time (or money) to waste— take the guesswork out of marketing success. She teaches you to track your marketing and make data-backed decisions on where to invest your marketing efforts, so you can stop the trial-and-error, start focusing on what gets you results, and save time on what doesn’t.
Today’s episode is brought to you by my Client Hub Template inside the DIY Systems Template Shop. Business owners often have their client information spread across a variety of different tools, making it hard to access the information they need to make critical decisions. That’s why I built the Client Hub Template for Airtable, to take the guesswork out of building your own!
Find it Quickly:
00:50 Kickoff for 2025: Data and Numbers
00:58 – Meet Allie Anderson
01:23 – Five Key Metrics for Business Success
03:41 – Tracking and Storing Your Data
06:32 – Understanding Reach Metrics
14:44 – Analyzing Sales Page Views
19:25 – Customer Lifetime Value Explained
22:35 – Understanding Customer Lifetime Value
23:11 – The Importance of Client Acquisition Cost
23:41 – Maximizing Repeat Business
24:22 – Automating Client Reminders
27:16 – Tracking Key Business Metrics
32:12 – Seasonal Trends in Photography
35:46 – Advanced Data Tracking Techniques
Mentioned in this Episode
Making Data-Driven Decisions in Your Business with Ally Anderson
Crafting an Intentional Marketing Plan with Tayler Cusick-Hollman [Marketing with Intention Series]
Connect with Ally
Website: link.akaridigital.ca/bfc
Instagram: instagram.com/akaridigital/
Training: link.akaridigital.ca/bfc-grow [Use code COLIE to get it for free]
Review the Transcript:
Colie: You are listening to the business first creatives podcast. I’m your host, Koli James. In each episode, you will hear real life stories behind the scene takes and practical insights for how to streamline and grow a creative business that brings you joy and a paycheck. Let’s get started.
Hello. Hello. And welcome back to the very first. First episode of the Business First Creators podcast for 2025. Now, just so that you know, we did not record this episode. Now it was recorded at the end of 2024, but this is the first episode in the January series to help you get your life and business together for 2025 so that you can have your best year yet.
And of course, I want to kick it off by talking about data, talking about numbers. Now, I know I said that, please do not tune me out. Allie Anderson is back on the podcast. If you did not hear her previous episode, it was episode 117 and it was called making data driven decisions in your business. So if you haven’t listened to that one, I don’t know if we’re going to, you know, cover all the things from that episode.
You might want to hit pause and go back and listen to that episode and then come back to this one. Because in this episode, Ali and I are going to talk about the nitty gritty. We are going to cover five numbers that you should all be tracking to make data driven decisions in your business and for your business in 2025.
Ally: Ali, hello friend, how are you? Hello, I’m doing great. Thank you so much for having me back. I’m so excited to be here and dig into the nitty gritty.
Colie: Yes. And guys, it has been such a twice. in 2024. Near the end, we were at Make Your Mark Live together, and she just happened to be in the Phoenix area when I was there for the SPARK conference.
So I got to see Allie twice in person and hug her and talk all about numbers. It was absolutely fantastic.
Ally: Yeah, it’s not a privilege that we get super often being in different countries, so it was so easy to get to squeeze you in real life.
Colie: Yes. So Allie, do you have your list of five numbers that we are going to need to track for 2025?
I
Ally: certainly do. And what I’ll probably do is I’ll give a really quick overview of these are the five that we’re going to talk about. And then we can probably get into a little bit more detail into each. And so the big kind of premise of what we are getting into is I want. Everybody to have the numbers to be able to know, do you have a reach problem?
Do you have a nurture problem, a conversion problem or attention problem? That’s kind of what we’re getting through, which was the big thing that I think we talked about in the initial episode that we did together. So the five numbers that I want you to be tracking, one, how many people you reach, we’ll get into what that specifically can be.
Cause it can be different for different, depending on how you’re marketing. Two. How many people are interested in or seeing your offers? We’ll get into that in your website analytics. Three, how many people are inquiring to work with you? Four, how many people are actually saying yes and paying you? And then five, your customer lifetime value.
So how much money does the average person spend with you? So those are the five numbers. Is there one that you want to dig into first?
Colie: I mean, I feel like we should just go down them in order. I mean, yes. And I think where people get caught up. One of the things that I want you to talk about, Allie, is the, is the nitty gritty of where we find these numbers, depending on what number it is that we want to track, and also how we should legitimately track it, because you and I both love Airtable, I think that some of your clients also use Google Sheets, but the one thing that I want to say is, we want this somewhere other than a stupid piece of paper.
I do want to say, I think Allie and I both agree, It needs to be somewhere, it needs to be electronic, it needs to be easily found, and it needs to be to where you can look at one month and compare it to the next month and compare it to the next month, and so on. So random pieces of paper are not going to cut it, and that doesn’t mean you have to pay a lot of money for fancy software.
Google Sheets is free, Airtable is free. But also not a random piece of paper on your desk. I feel like that, I, maybe I’m just talking to myself. I am tired of random post its. It is my goal for 2025 to no longer put anything on a post it. Allie, how about you?
Ally: Oh, um, so freakin lutely. I, as like, so I have ADHD, and I love writing things down and making lists.
It’s how, throughout my entire life, that’s how things happen. But I literally am looking and I have four different notebooks that all have a whole bunch of lists and reminders for me that I like never go back and look at and numbers can be the same way that if you put them somewhere and you never look at it again, that’s not where you’re going to get the value from it.
We want to put this somewhere that you can bookmark, you can reference to quickly, easily, because what’s the point in tracking the numbers if you’re not even going to look at it and use it? We want this to be somewhere that it’s easily accessible. So to like answer your question of where to save this, where to house all this information, there is nothing wrong with a good old spreadsheet.
Is it going to be the most visual, exciting, easy way to analyze? No, of course not. But if you’re just getting started and the best that you can do is pull up a spreadsheet, make those five rows, reach, aware of offers, become a lead, like inquire to work with you, make a sale in your customer lifetime value.
And then months across the top and every single month you take five minutes, 10 minutes, whatever it takes to go and pop in those five numbers and you bookmark that and you save it. You know what? You are doing more than I would randomly say like 75 percent of most of the population. Absolutely.
Absolutely. And Even if it’s not beautiful, it’s not perfect. You have that information to reference back to. And if you get on a call with your coach or you choose to work with someone like me or someone that is able to use, help you use those numbers, you’re able to, in five seconds, pull that up. And we can make so many important decisions for your business.
Colie: Absolutely.
Ally: If you want to get fancy and work in Airtable, you do that too. And I can like, you can help teach people. I can help teach people, but. Start with a spreadsheet. That’s easy.
Colie: Absolutely. So we’re going to start with reach. And the thing is, when someone like you talks to someone like me, and you’re like, you know, how many people are you reaching?
That can go in so many different ways. So Allie, tell me the different kinds of reach that me as a creative entrepreneur, or even more specifically as a photographer, what are the different kinds of reach number that I may care about for my business?
Ally: Yes. Yeah. So when I say reach and why it’s intentionally a vague term is exactly that.
That if you are marketing with SEO blogs or if you’re marketing with Instagram or wherever other thing that you’re doing. That number, we just want to know how many people are seeing your content or coming across your face, your website, whatever, in a given period of time. A given month is probably what we’ll talk about through this podcast of tracking these things monthly.
So, if I want you to ask yourself, how Do I primarily get in front of new people or get in front of people in general? If that is SEO blogs, look at reach or traffic to your blog. If that is on Instagram, look at reach on Instagram. If everything, you know, you’re doing a bunch of stuff and everything funnels into your website, You can just track overall traffic on your website.
And that’s a good pulse check. Truthfully, when I’m doing this for my clients, we typically break it out into a few different reach metrics if they’re doing different things. So if that is something that you want to break that reach out a little bit, do that. A plus even better than just your five metrics.
It’s like 5. 3 or whatever of getting three additional ones, but you just need to know, are you getting in front of people every single month with the opportunity to pull them into the rest of your marketing system?
Colie: And I do think that that’s important for us to talk about the fact that it could be different numbers.
We are maybe not talking about one number unless you are literally only marketing in one place. Now, if everyone’s coming to your website and the only thing that you are doing is writing Then your website number, your actual traffic to your blog posts in general, that might work for you. But if you’re doing Instagram, and you’re doing Pinterest, and you’re on LinkedIn, and you’re doing SEO blogs, and you have a podcast, I wonder who we could be talking about right now.
If you perhaps have all of these different places where you are showing up, the one thing that I don’t want you to do is take all of those numbers and add them together and stick it in a column. That Because then you’re not actually figuring out from January to February, February to March, if your reach is actually increasing on those individual channels.
So anything that you have to look up individually, I would say you should probably write that number down. down individually so that you have it to look at and track and see if you are increasing or perhaps decreasing on any of your particular marketing channels. Now we haven’t mentioned email marketing yet, but that is also a good one because technically that is still reach.
That is people who Who you are sending an email to every month. Now, I also think it goes with one of your other numbers. So maybe that’s not in the reach category, but in general, guys, if you look up a number individually, I want it to have a place somewhere in this electronic guide that you are creating to keep track of that number.
Ally: Yeah, totally agree. And things like email or if somebody has, you know, like a free community or some way that they’re getting people to opt into something, those. I argue are more of your, like, nurture tactics, and you’re getting people to opt in. For the five numbers that we put here, I’ve kind of excluded nurture, just, you know, to simplify things.
So reach, and then we’re going straight to how many people are interested in your offers and looking at sales pages or offer pages or whatever that is. But that email list for simplicity sake, track that, like you’re saying is its own line as ways that you’re reaching people, but knowing that people need to like opt in, like there’s an extra step to get them in there.
So growing that looks a little bit different than getting more reach on Instagram or on Pinterest or something like that.
Colie: Because you’re not going to grow your emails list based on search. I think that first one is really, we didn’t say search, but that first list, we’re really talking about search. How many people could find you on Instagram either organically or by searching for a key term or seeing you on something else, but like all of that is publicly available.
It’s not something that you have hidden behind any kind of paywall, any kind of opt in, anything like that. Yeah, totally agree. Totally agree. Yeah.
Ally: So then like the wonderful thing about knowing this number, cause one thing that people often throw at me is, well, isn’t that just a vanity metric? Like how many people am I getting in front of?
And on its own, is that one number on its own going to tell you much about your business? No, of course not. It is a vanity metric in quotations, but that paired with the next number of how many people are interested or considering working with you being The metric that we’re tracking is, do they see your services pages or your offer pages or whatever you’re directing them to on your website?
The percentage difference between that can tell you a lot because lots of people will default to, okay, I want to get more sales. I want to get more clients. I want to do more. So they post more on Instagram where they’re like, I’m going to start SEO blogging or add something new to the plate or start doing more.
Whereas if you’re reaching more than enough people, but they’re not finding about your offers. That’s a very different problem to solve than. I’m not reaching enough people at all, because I have a good percentage that are coming through.
Colie: But also, going back to that vanity metric, because I completely agree with you, but also you need to know if you are in fact reaching anyone.
Because the thing about the reach numbers is, I could put out a blog post, but unless I’m actually looking at the traffic to my website, and seeing how many clicks and how many people actually access that blog, I could be blogging every week, And if I’m not getting anyone that’s saying they’re interested in my offers, if I’m not actually booking, well, I don’t know if my blog is the problem unless I know that anybody actually saw it.
If no one saw it, it is not a problem with perhaps your messaging. It is not a problem with what you’re saying about your offers versus if a lot of people, like if you’re getting hundreds, even thousands of people that are seeing your blogs and no one is reaching out. You might have a content problem.
You might have a messaging problem. So these numbers are just helping you kind of hone in on what possible problems or possible like strengths you currently have inside your business.
Ally: Totally. The thing that I hear from people all the time when they come to work with me is that they feel like they’re throwing spaghetti at the wall with their marketing.
And when we’re able to identify with these five numbers, where the actual problem is, what I often say is we’ve gone from at least throwing spaghetti at the wall to throwing spaghetti at the right wall. So that’s going to get us a heck of a lot closer. And you know what? If that’s what you’re doing, that’s way better than again, 75, 80 percent of business owners out there.
And then we need to figure out what spaghetti are we going to throw? And that’s okay. Should it be Instagram versus Pinterest? Or is it this thing on the sales page or that thing on the sales page? And that’s where we can get deeper and be more nitty gritty with the numbers. But at least if we know that the sales page is the problem or Instagram is the problem or whatever, we’re, we’re leagues ahead of just randomly throwing something out there and hoping it’s going to work.
Colie: I got a visual in my head of someone standing in a room with a blindfold, which I know sounds ridiculous, but work with me. They’re standing in a room with a blindfold and they’re facing two walls. The wall on the left has no targets. The wall on the right has like a bullseye, like you’re throwing darts at it and you’re just picking up the spaghetti and you’re just, you keep throwing it at the wall on the left and there’s nothing for you to actually hit.
Ally: Yeah, that’s my visual for today, Allie. So tracking these numbers, at least you’re going to be able to, well, this is where I’m throwing it. Let’s see what happens. And of course we want to get more strategic and deeper. Yes. In an ideal world. But if we don’t have the capacity or the bandwidth to like get that deep into it, we’re at least headed in the right direction.
Yes. So this second number being how many people are seeing your offers and sales pages, so you can compare the people that you’re reaching to, are they seeing things, and then we move into metric number three, which is how many people actually. inquire, become a lead, or if there’s a sale, like directly on there, if it’s like, we’re talking photographers.
So if it’s a like mini photo session, you might not have a sales call. So then how many people are actually buying the thing or doing the thing that you want them to do? So from the sales page to the action that you want them to take. Again, again, we’re looking at how many people do it. And then what’s the percentage difference between, and that would be your, sales page conversion rate or your services page conversion rate, whatever we’re looking at.
But being able to know that difference there is again, is going to be able to tell you, are people interested in what I’m offering? Is it resonating? Are they actually wanting this thing that I’m selling? Or are they coming here, not even getting anything that they need and leaving? And it’s nothing to do with your marketing, your emails, your Instagram, your whatever.
It’s. This one page needs to be refined, tweaked, or the offer needs to be adjusted.
Colie: So I feel like I’ve covered this in other episodes, but I do want to say it here since we are talking about the numbers, that first number that she mentioned, finding your reach, finding your website traffic can be very difficult for people and also very easy.
And I feel like the people that make it difficult, it’s because we tell you, Well, you need to take this Google Pixel and go put it on your website, and the minute that you mention, like, copying code from one place to the next, we’ve lost almost everyone that’s listening to us, and they don’t really believe us when we say, but no, it, like, really takes less than five minutes, and you only have to do it the one time, and, like, every single website host that I can think of has their very own like tutorial video that shows you where this piece of code goes on your particular website.
So I think I do want to say right now, if you do not have an analytics account with Google and a console account, but that’s not really like specific for this, but you need an analytics account so that you can know how many people are actually hitting your website. And there are a few others, but I feel like Google is like the lowest hanging fruit because it’s free.
And everyone can access it just by creating an account. Now again, you go in, you put in some information, you tell Google that you actually own this website, and it might make you verify this. But then you take this one piece of code, you copy it on your website, and after that, you’re done. As soon as it starts tracking the data on your website, you are going to be able to go back into Google Analytics and see how many people hit your page this week, this month, this quarter, this year.
And that is where you are going to get that very specific number of reach if we are talking about your website reach. Now, then I want to go to the second number because I feel like this is CRM land. So for those of you that have a CRM because I have been, you know, bugging the shit out of you to tell you to get one.
The next number that she’s talking about people interested for most of us photographers, those are going to be the people that fill out your inquiry form. Now, if you are not funneling everybody through an inquiry form, if someone contacts you on Instagram or sends you a specific email and you just start a project for those people, you are going to need to track it in a different way so that those people can be included in your this many people inquired about my services this month.
But that is a number that you can get from your CRM easily, even if you don’t do anything but open it and just count. The number of inquiries that you got and then, of course, there’s the third number that Allie mentioned, which again, if you are a photographer and you are using a CRM, you can go inside and just look at how many booked projects you got that month.
Okay, I’m done with where you get the numbers, Allie. You can continue.
Ally: Well, I’m actually going to clarify because the ones that you went through is actually 1, And so number two of how many people are aware of your offers. And I call this like interested is how many people are seeing your sales page. And so that is also living in Google analytics, and then you can go into the specific pages report and see how many people saw the specific page.
You don’t need to do any fancy filters. It’s super easy to find. So like one reach to, we kind of use different lingo of it. How many people are seeing your sales or offer pages? We’ll get specific. Three being inquire, four being pay you. Okay. So then we get into the fifth one, which is customer lifetime value.
I know when you and I first talked, this was one of our like things that we really jammed on is that, okay, you got these sales, but did you keep them? Or like, did you keep these people coming around again and again? If that is a model for your business, if you’re a photographer, I imagine you want people to book family sessions.
yearly, or every couple of years, or, you know, maybe they also hire you for a different type of project, or if you’re a wedding photographer, it might not be that they’re getting married again, you know, maybe they are, but you might be looking for referrals, or like, retention can look differently for different businesses, but I want you to ask yourself, what do I want people to do?
Do I want them to book quarterly, annually? Whatever do I want them to tell their friends about this? And then does that actually happen? And customer lifetime value is how we’ll figure that out. The easiest way to calculate it and the simplest way to calculate it, open up your, maybe this is in your CRM.
It’s also probably in your accounting software. How much revenue did you make in the last two years of business? Five years of business, however many years of businesses you have. How many customers have you had? Divide that by the other, you’ve got a general rough number. And does that make sense? On average, are people booking multiple shoots?
Are they doing more? The referral piece is a little bit harder that we can jam on in a little bit, but that will give you a baseline number of how often are people actually booking with you.
Colie: And I want to clarify because a lot of people hear me talk about numbers specifically for photographers and I want to make sure that they heard you very clearly about that last number.
There’s a number that I talk about a lot and that’s not your average lifetime customer value, that is just your customer value. So one thing that I’ve been talking about in my Airtable hub, my client hub, is that every time you make a sale it feeds in there and then you can see how much you’ve made from an individual client.
Over the lifetime of working with you. Ideally, you want that number to keep on increasing year after year. But that’s not what Allie’s talking about. Allie’s talking about if one person Hires you three times in one year. You don’t count that three times. You count it as one customer. So you’re looking at the total number of different people that hire you in a year and you are taking the total amount that you made and dividing it by that number.
Just want to make sure that it’s really clear because unfortunately this is not a number that your CRM just gives you. It is easy to get, as Allie said, if you guys have a total amount that you made for the year, which all of us should, because all of us should be doing taxes, and it asks for your total revenue.
I mean, it asks for that everywhere. And then all you need to do is the number of people that you worked with. Now there’s one more number that photographers track. And again, this is not what Allie’s talking about, but if you have sessions that have different costs and you take how much money you made and you divide it by the number of sessions that you did for the year, that is an average session value.
That is not an average customer. Value. I just want to make clear that these are two different things, which, hey, that last one’s a good number to track too. So once you get these five numbers that Allie’s telling you to track, I’ve got a whole nother list of them guys that you could be working on. So you just hit me up in the DMs.
Ally: Yeah, and like the beauty of tracking this customer lifetime value over their entire lifetime of working with you is this gives you an idea of For the either money you’re spending on marketing or the time and energy that you’re putting into your marketing, is it actually worth it? The, one of the other numbers that I’ll put into these bonus number categories for you is like the cost of acquiring a new customer.
Colie: Acquisition. I knew you were going to say that, Allie.
Ally: Yeah. And at the, and this is what I do when I work with clients is we pull their, um, client acquisition cost, how much it costs to get a new customer. And we compare that to their customer lifetime value. And sometimes. Business owners have never seen those numbers next to each other.
And it’s just like a light bulb of, Oh my goodness. No wonder this isn’t as profitable as I thought it would be. And the beauty of it is when you notice that that’s, there’s a discrepancy there and you want that customer lifetime value to be a lot higher, that is one of the easiest marketing problems to solve.
We don’t need to convince new people that we’re great at what we do, that they want to work with us, that they’ll feel comfortable in our photo sessions, whatever that may be. They’ve already experienced that with you. Often you just need to remind them that this is something that they can book you for again.
I’ll always bring in the example of my, like, hairdresser would make so much more money off of me if she just reminded me to book an appointment every three months.
Colie: Y’all, y’all are not watching YouTube. You don’t see me like pointing at Allie over. So I’m literally doing a Dubsado setup this week and one of the emails I didn’t even have to tell her to do it.
So Robin, shout out to you. She wrote an email that she wanted to automatically go out eight months later after their session date to be like, Hey, it’s time to book your annual session again. Here’s instructions on how you do this. And then she’s also reminding them of her referral fee that she pays them when they refer her to their friends and family.
So, I mean, it’s a really good thing for you to have in terms of automatic reminders. And of course, Family sessions are one thing, branding sessions are another thing, but I always say there’s a lot of money that almost every newborn photographer is missing simply by not asking people to book you again in the same year.
Yeah, like babies grow. A newborn is very different than a three month, a six month, a nine month, and a one year. Well, maybe there’s not so much of a difference between three, six, nine, but you get what I’m saying, like they grow a lot in that first year. And I’m sure their parents want
Ally: that to be documented.
Colie: Yeah. Yes! So if you tell them, And you remind them, and you very gently ask them if they would like another session. I mean, even if 1 out of 3, 1 out of 4 says yes, that’s money that you probably wouldn’t have gotten if you didn’t remind them that you are still here and available to photograph their family again.
This year, not next year, this year.
Ally: And hearing, like, I’m sure lots of the listeners are thinking, Oh, but like, I don’t want to be salesy, I don’t want to do whatever. Put yourself in the shoes of the parent of a newborn, or a busy business person, or whoever your audience is. They don’t have the mental capacity, the brain space to remember to do all these things.
If you’re just like, hey, like, just a reminder that if you want this, I’m here for you. You have done them a favor. They’re very likely going to be like, Oh, right. Yes. And if it’s not the right time for them, then they’ll either ignore it or say, Hey, not a good time. That’s fine. Yeah. You’re just putting an invitation out there.
Colie: I mean, almost everyone, if we think about how we are in our lives as consumers, though, like, for example, I just got another Tiguan. The VW app on my phone and actually inside of my car. It reminds me as I approach 10, 000 miles that it is time for me to get an oil change. Now, is it necessarily the same as getting a photo session?
No, but I certainly don’t want to go over in my car and it just slipped my mind and forget about it. And then I end up with like black sludge in my car. Guys, I need those reminders. Please think of your clients in the same way. Some of them want to work with you again, sooner than you think. All you have to do is send the reminder or make the offer.
Not everyone is going to say yes. But those that do say yes are going to be grateful that you sent them the reminder.
Ally: Yeah. And any opportunity that you have to get this customer lifetime value higher is going to make every single other dollar spent, hour spent doing your marketing go further. It is by far, this is how you make your marketing more profitable.
In the easiest, simplest way is by getting people to work from you again and again and again.
Colie: Did you know business owners often have their client information spread across their CRM, email marketing software, online shop, and project management tools, making it hard to access the information they need to make critical decisions?
For this reason, having all of my client data gathered and centralized in one place has been the best decision I have made in recent years. That’s exactly why I created a client hub template inside of Airtable just for you. From customizable zaps that make it easy to maintain to automations for communication, this easy to use Airtable template makes setting up your client hub a breeze.
You can check it out inside my template shop at coleyjames. com slash hub or at the link in the show notes of today’s episode.
You talked about that referral number and then you talked about the acquisition number. I do want to say like, let’s say that you have an acquisition number, let’s say you’re running ads or let’s say that you’re thinking about it in the time that you spend in your marketing, whatever it is that you calculate that cost of acquisition.
Let’s say that. Your cost of acquisition for getting a brand new client in your photography business is 200. I’m just picking that number. Sure. Let’s say that you offer your clients a 100 referral when they bring you a new client. Do you guys realize what you’ve done? You’ve taken this first client that probably cost you about 200 to acquire through whatever marketing you were doing and you just cut your cost of acquisition in half by having them bring you your next client and you’re paying them 100.
Now I would even take it one step further if instead of paying them 100 cash, if you gave them 100 product credit,
Ally: then you’re making even more
Colie: money. Because then, you know, you’re giving them a print or something that would cost them a hundred dollars, but it doesn’t actually cost you a hundred dollars.
So guys, there are lots of ways to get your average customer value up. And when we think about referrals and cost of acquisition and all these, remember, these are bonus things that Allie and I are talking about. If we’re scaring you, Please just ignore this part and come back to this episode when you are ready, because again, five numbers that we want everybody to track in 2025.
But once you get those five numbers and you see how easy it is to actually just look up a number and write it down every month, you are going to start thinking to yourself, okay, what other numbers should I be tracking in my business in order to make decisions? And then Allie and I are both here as like your cheerleaders to give you lots, lots, lots more numbers that you could be tracking.
Ally: Yeah, absolutely. It’s start simple, start where you’re at, and then you can build on it later. And these skills that you’re learning about how to track these numbers, how to use them, they’re going to make you a stronger, smarter business owner for so many aspects of your business, not even just within this marketing context that we’re talking about.
And it’s going to help you build a more profitable business for yourself.
Colie: Now, Allie, I know that there is someone in the listening audience that’s going to be like, Okay, I’m going to track them every month, and I’m going to look at them every month, and I’m going to try to analyze them every month, and I’m going to try to make decisions every month.
Allie, what do you think about that?
Ally: I typically recommend you don’t want to make too many changes and then constantly feel like you’re just like chasing the next little thing. I like to strategize in a quarterly window and we still track our numbers every single month because if I’m expecting my sales page conversion rate to be 3 percent or 5 percent and then one month I notice that it’s 1%, I want that little like red flag to come up when I’m checking those numbers in that month, because I might want to jump in and fix something right away if I see a red flag or an issue, or if I’m tracking my reach for SEO and I see it start to slowly decline.
That’s a red flag that, Ooh, I might need to do some optimizing. I might need to figure out what the problem is. But in terms of me making a data back decision for, I am now going to focus on this thing for my business. I tend to do those in more of a quarterly stance so that you have enough data to actually measure and see if it’s working.
Plus, you just don’t want to burn yourself out by constantly feeling like you’re reinventing things.
Colie: And I will say, like, we’re talking about what you’re going to do in 2025, but the thing about photography, and a lot of other businesses, but like, I would argue that my setup services, even though it can be seasonal, it is mostly not.
But photography, especially family photographers, we are very cyclical. Like we have an incredibly chaotic, crazy fall and in winter, unless you are doing in home sessions or you’re doing newborns or you live somewhere that it’s very warm, which Allie and I do not, you are not really doing family sessions year round.
So the really great thing about getting started now in January of 2025 and tracking your numbers for 2025 is then in 2026 you actually have a number to compare it to because honestly we are going to want to compare our winter numbers to our winter numbers from the previous year. You are not going to want to compare What kind of traffic you’re getting in January to what kind of traffic you’re getting in July newsflash.
I can tell you, your July traffic is going to be way higher than January. Why? Because in July and August, everyone is thinking about booking a fall session. In January, no one is thinking about booking a family session because it’s likely that they just had one. So. Again, we want this first year of data really so that when you go into 2026, you’re like, Oh my gosh, I can see exactly what I did last year.
And hopefully you are seeing a trend upwards. In that case, when you’re comparing like Q1 of 2026 to Q1 of 2025, we want to see some growth. Even if it’s just a tiny bit, we want to see some growth.
Ally: Totally. And just the, something that I hear from people all the time when they start tracking and looking at these numbers and know where to compare it to, there’s the peace of mind that things are going down, but I don’t need to panic because although last month things were higher or three months ago, things were higher.
But I look at last year, this is normal. This is a seasonal trend. And the peace of mind that can come from that, that you’re not stressing and feeling like, oh my gosh, now I need to go do all these things because leads are down and it’s like, No, this is the period where it’s going to start building up.
So let me plan for when I want to build it up or you know why these things are happening and you don’t need to be worried about it.
Colie: Yeah, I have a coaching student who was a little worried about her numbers in June. And I said, yeah, you’re not doing as well in June this year as you were last year. But remember, we’re still in kind of like an economic crisis.
I feel like people, it’s not that people are not going to book photography sessions. It’s that they are delaying, they are waiting until closer to fall than they have ever before. And what happened like a month later, she sent me a text message that she actually did hit her goal. for the rest of the year.
And now she was done, but it took longer in 2024 for that to happen. So also just keep that in mind. That is why Allie is saying, if you look at your numbers for a quarter, You don’t automatically panic when there’s one particular month that’s an outlier. Whereas when you average it with the other numbers in that same time period, like maybe you are doing just fine in a three month period versus you’re comparing one specific month to one specific month.
Ally: Yeah, because there are so many different factors that can make things look a little bit wonky and we just need to look at overall trends. We don’t need to get super worried about one specific month or one specific blip.
Colie: And I think I want to say just looking at these numbers, we talked about the second number is looking at the people who are interested to the people that actually see your sales page.
If you are not a photographer and your services page is not your sales page on your website, and you actually have a sales page like on Thrive Cart or Sam Cart or something like that. I hope you guys all know that you can actually get that number. from your sales cart software. Like you can see the number of, I can see the number of people that have hit my course checkout page in thrive cart at any given time.
So I just wanted to put that out there because while we’re mostly talking to photographers in this instance, if you are not a photographer and you are selling something like digital products or services on a traditional cart, you will just be able to get that number out of your cart software, as well as your conversion number on how many people bought that particular product.
So, I mean, you get bonus. You get it just right there, already calculated for you.
Ally: Yeah, cuts one step out of the process for sure.
Colie: It does. Now, Allie, now that I’ve mentioned that, now I’m thinking, is there, I know that we have these five numbers and this is what we want to start with. But like in the case of photographers, is there any value in them actually breaking that down a little bit further, particularly once they get past the reach, if they’re looking at the number of people who are interested and then the number of people who inquired, If they look at that broken down by genre.
So like if they have those numbers for family sessions, they have those numbers for weddings. If they do more than one kind of photography, I don’t, so all of mine are just lumped together. But you know, some of my listeners and some of my students shoot very different things with very different price points.
And so like it might be interesting for them to actually break these numbers down together, but also individually for the genres.
Ally: Yes. Yeah. And so again, I’d say if thinking of breaking this down and making the spreadsheet more complicated freaks you out, start simple. It’s okay. But if you want to take that next step and start to get more strategic, exactly what you’re saying, where you would break it out, how many people saw this sales page and how many inquired for that specific service?
How many people saw the second one and inquired for that specific service? The most important thing though, is think of it more of like the type of consumer. If I offer. So, if people are looking for two different types of family photography shoots and they’re on different sales pages, we can lump those together.
It’s more people looking for family photography versus how many people inquired about family photography, people looking for newborn photography, et cetera. Like, it’s more about the audience versus the specific product. Yeah. But that’ll help you get an idea of is your messaging really landing with, you know, your family folks and your brand shoots.
are not resonating, then that’s where you need to focus your energy on. If that’s a angle of your business that you want to build up more.
Colie: Okay. Now I’m curious. This has nothing to do with you people that are listening. I’m sorry. I’m going to ask you a question. That’s probably not helpful to you now, but I want to just plant a little seed.
Does Google give you the number of how far someone scrolls down on a page as a new metric number? Like, is that something that Google does or is it different software?
Ally: So Google can do that, but it will not do it by default. So, when I have people that work with me, or I have a product that they can follow through to set this up for them, but it will track how many people scrolled 90 percent of the page, but that doesn’t really give you as much context.
When we get to the point that we’re like, okay, this specific page isn’t converting, that’s exactly what we look at, is we set up tracking to know, did they scroll 25, 50, 75%? Where did they drop off? And how long did they stay? Did they say 10 seconds, 30 seconds, 60 seconds? Did they see specific things on the page?
We can get really excited and like get so much context and information to identify where exactly the problem is on that page. So we don’t need to rewrite a whole sales page. It’s above the fold. We just need to fix this one section or by the time they get to the offer, they’re not actually clicking and saying bye, but that’s definitely like more intermediate level data versus.
Colie: You said intermediate level. So I’m sitting here thinking to myself, the question I was going to ask you, Allie, like, are there actual other people that care about this besides like you, me and Taylor? So, I mean, guys, Taylor was the first episode of the Marketing with Intention series, and she is also a friend of Allie and I’s.
But like, I’m sitting here thinking to myself, like, that particular level, like, I don’t know that the average consumer, like would want that information. But like, if they came to me and they were like, you know, my traffic to my sales page is really high, but my conversion and my actual inquiries are very low.
That’s when you start looking at that sales page. And while, you know, you can always get someone like a copywriter to go through and tell you how to improve your CTAs, read your copy and, you know, give you these kinds of things. I was just thinking to myself, Is there numerical data that someone could look at to see after you make the change?
Are they actually getting further down the page? So it’s really interesting that you said that, but again, listening audience, if Allie said that and you were like, Whoa, that’s a step too far. It’s okay. I anticipate that this is an episode that you are going to want to listen to. When you set up the five numbers and then when you do the five numbers and you get really excited, I want you to listen to it again.
And I want you to pick out all these bonus numbers that Allie and I were talking about that no one really cares about now except for us. And then this last one where we’re talking about tracking how far someone scrolls down on your page. I mean, that’s an entirely different ballpark because then you can also do something like hot jar to like do heat signatures and see where people come down.
But. I think that the thing that Ali and I both agree on is that data is very important to know how your business is doing and how you can make decisions to make your business better.
Ally: Yeah, put down the spaghetti and step away from the wall. Like, let’s use those numbers to figure out where your actual problems are.
And then when you want to take it further and figure out why it’s happening and get more nitty gritty. You can do that, but at least know that you’re throwing spaghetti at the right wall, know what problem you’re fixing, and needs to be fixed, what’s the bottlenecking gap in your business, so that you can make your marketing more profitable.
Colie: Yes. Allie, you know it’s always fantastic when you come visit me, and it’s been about a hundred episodes since you were on here, so let’s just plan on you coming in before another hundred, okay? I would love that. So tell everyone in case they live under a rock and they didn’t hear how they could find you last time.
Where is it that they can find out more information about you and the services that you offer to make everyone better at tracking and interpreting their data for their business?
Ally: I would love to share. So I am on Instagram is where I’m most active on the socials. Uh, so Akari Digital, A K A R I Digital, is my handle and I share lots of information and tips and stuff on there.
Uh, the, I’d love to give your listeners a specific offer. I have a training that typically costs 27, but if they use the coupon code Koli, it’s gonna give it to them for free. And so it’s my training called Marketing Data for Entrepreneurs, and pretty much what we talked about of these different numbers, I give you.
A spreadsheet template that you can start to plug things into. I teach you how to get your Google analytics configured properly. If that’s something that you want to simplest, easiest way. And it’ll even take it a little bit of a next level. If you want to start knowing, is my Instagram sending traffic to my website or is it my email or something else?
I teach you how to effectively do that. So it takes what we talked about today. gives it to you in more of a like training format again so you can really action it as you’re watching and then it takes it one little baby step further.
Colie: Guys, I love Allie’s trainings. Like, I love it. Even though I consider myself to be a good tracker, I still learn things when I watch Allie teach.
And, you know, she just, she talks about my favorite subject. I keep on joking that if I get tired of systems, I will move over to doing something with data. Cause that’s what I did in another life. You know, statistics, all that jazz. But I am always very jealous. of Allie and all the fun that she gets to have looking at other people’s data.
Ally: But if somebody wants to take advantage of that, you can find it in my link in bio and Instagram, or if you DM me Coley, I’ll send you the link directly there with the coupon code and everything.
Colie: Awesome sauce. All right, everyone. I hope that you have gotten something out of this first episode. And just so that you know, things to come, getting your business legally ready for 2025.
And also, we’re going to be talking to a money expert about how to make sure that you are getting the most profit for the rest of 2025. Those are just two. I still have two more that I think I’m going to do for this series and we’ll see how it pans out. But everyone, that’s it for this episode. See you next time.
Thanks for listening to the business first creatives podcast. For more information on this podcast, including show notes and links to the video podcast, please visit coleyjames. com slash podcast. Are you loving the podcast? Sharing is caring until next time.
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