You Better Get A Solid Handle On This
I made this mistake early on... and believe it easily cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars.
With all of the different online paid advertising channels available to us today (i.e. PPC, PPV, CPA, CPM, email drops, etc.)... not too mention... all of the different freebie traffic generation opportunities... it's very easy to lose track of which channels, methods and tactics are actually producing money and which ones aren't.
The result is that most online marketers don't really have a true handle on their marketing and sales metrics.
Sure, most know some of the basic metrics like total unique visitors, visitor value, and average sale.
But, when it comes to being able to tell you ROI for each and every dollar and hour invested in all of the various channels and activities, they can't do it.
And because of that, most online entrepreneurs can't make the most effective (and profitable) decisions for their business: decisions based on objective data.
The ultimate end-result of this is a business that is not scalable.
(It's not scalable because they can't effectively invest more and more marketing capital because they don't know where that additional capital should and shouldn't go. And that's a business-growth killer!)
Listen:
If you ever want to have a monster business online, you can't allow your analytics and metrics to get out of control. (If they already have, you need to rectify that ASAP.)
You need to monitor every single dollar invested in your marketing and advertising... and hold it accountable for a positive return on investment (ROI).
If you can't track the ROI of a particular marketing or traffic-generation channel, DON'T SPEND THE MONEY ON IT.
There's no value in spending money on a particular marketing method if you can't track it's performance and won't have any way to know whether to dump it or scale it.
And, you need to know at all times what activities, channels, and traffic tactics are producing profit and which ones aren't... and at what level for each.
Ultimately, the objective (when trying to consistently grow your business) is to find channels and tactics that give you a positive ROI... scale those... and decrease or eliminate the others.
And, you can only do that if you have a solid handle on your metrics and analytics.