Objitec Business Metrics & Progress Report Jan 2016
By Martin Gilliard
A warm welcome to the first Objitec business metrics and progress report of 2016.
We make these reports public so that others can learn, comment on, or even advise us on where to improve. All comments are welcome at the end of the post.
Google Analytics And Google Search Console
As a reminder the sites that we manage as part of the Objitec company include…
objitec.com : This site, used for tracking metrics and other company related activities. Will provide links to all company products and activities.
online-booking-system.net : For marketing only and for now will just be one or two pages that direct traffic to planit-bookit.com.
planit-bookit.com : Main product page. Incorporates all the different business sectors in which PlanIt-BookIt is implemented or would like to be established in. Aim is to drive content to this site via well written and researched articles that are relevant to the sector in which bookings could or would be made.
This month we wrote and published one new article on planit-bookit.com…
24 Squash Tips That Will Help You Improve Your Game Today
As you can see from the analytics traffic below. The articles are slowly beginning to increase traffic on our core sales page. PlanIt-BookIt.com which ultimately should be a good thing.
Towards the end of this month we additionally added analytics tracking code to the PlanIt-BookIt application. Which you can now see is the last entry on the chart below.
Traffic to our main site has almost doubled – so all is looking good there.
Metrics
I used to work for a large American Corporate giant that was obsessed with metrics. Using metrics to track progress is so much ingrained in to me now that I simply had to add some to this report. These may change over the months to come and I may add new ones or drop some that don’t appear to be adding much value.
| Metric | Dec 2015 | Jan 2016 | Comment |
|---|---|---|---|
| Objitec Traffic | 25 | 13 | Only includes this monthly report so not expecting much |
| Online Booking System Traffic | 444 | 301 | Traffic is too high for what we have. Some dodgy sites linking to us. 50% traffic from Russia |
| PlanIt-BookIt Traffic | 37 | 62 | Almost a 60% increase in traffic to our core promotional site which is excellent. |
| Published PlanIt-BookIt Pages | 3 | 4 | More pages should increase traffic metric above |
| @planitbookit Tweets | 2 | 2 | Not focused on social media much yet. |
| @planitbookit Following | 0 | 3 | Not focused on social media much yet. |
| @planitbookit Followers | 1 | 3 | Not focused on social media much yet. |
| @objitec Tweets | 7 | 8 | Not focused on social media much yet. |
| @objitec Following | – | 4 | Not focused on social media much yet. |
| @objitec Followers | 1 | 4 | Not focused on social media much yet. |
| PlanIt-BookIt Page Comments | 0 | 0 | Need to keep focusing on quality articles |
| Customers | 2 | 2 | The most important metric. Need to focus more on marketing soon. |
| PlanIt-BookIt Facebook Posts | 6 | 6 | Not focused on social media much yet. |
| PlanIt-BookIt Facebook Likes | 5 | 5 | Not focused on social media much yet. |
| Objitec Facebook Posts | 7 | 8 | Not focused on social media much yet. |
| Objitec Facebook Likes | 0 | 1 | Not focused on social media much yet. |
This is quite a lot of metrics, so like I mentioned earlier we may not continue to use all of these. However, giving them a quick glance over now it’s cleat that we need to put some sort of social media strategy in place.
Development
We’ve been quite busy on the development front this month. We smartened up the My Account section, adding tabs and a configurable additional info section plus a section for adding notes.
We now display to the member on the front page of PlanIt-Bookit if their membership has expired or if it is close to expiring.
We also had a bug this month which took quite a while to find. Occasionally people were getting thrown out of the new ranking system. It turned out that we had forgot to close one of the database connections. All is fixed and working well again now though!
Also with the ranking system we had a number of members submitting scores for the wrong activity or simply submitting the wrong score. So we decided to stop the activity from defaulting to anything and to implement an undo option. The undo option took quite a bit of effort as it required us changing the database structure. Instead of storing the rankings of the player we changed it to just store the differences gained or lost from a new result. Doing so meant that we could simply role back a result with a simple click button request from the member…
We added an option for people to search the members directory and we added (as you may have noticed from all of the uploaded screenshots) our PlanIt-BookIt logo to the application. Clicking on the PlanIt-BookIt logo takes you directly to the PlanIt-BookIt web (sales) page.
We also added a Membership menu option where you can view your current membership including start date, end date and renewal price. A future goal will be to enable the member to renew their membership directly from this page.
This month we also started work on a new sign up and pricing page. Which so far is looking like this…
This page is going to be linked to from planit-bookit.com possibly via a pricing page first. XXXXX will be replaced with a dynamically generated display of the customers selected plan. This page automatically adds details into our login and client tables and encrypts sensitive information.
We updated our new plugin functionality too this month so it only makes one initial call to the database.
And finally this month we also started detailed tracking of all our tasks in an agile SCRUM type fashion using the tools available to us as part of our Microsoft subscription.
PayPal
At last we got PayPal successfully working with payments coming through.
New Business
On Tue 5th of January we went live with memberships at the equestrian center.
