There seem to be two types of entrepreneurs: those who enjoy analyzing data and numbers, and those who avoid it at all costs. I used to be in the latter group, but I've been working on improving in this area, and it has made a significant difference. 

As entrepreneurs, we have access to a wealth of valuable information that can guide our business decisions, from podcast metrics to social media numbers and email lists. In today's episode, I speak with my friend Allison, a metrics and data specialist who loves using spreadsheets and dashboards to help entrepreneurs make informed, data-driven decisions. 

Join Podcast Like You Mean It before doors close on Sunday, March 26th!

Connect with Allison on Instagram @hello_allisonkrysl

Show Notes: https://podcastingforeducators.com/episode90.

Join the Podcasting for Educators Prep-School: https://podcastingforeducators.com/prepschool

Follow along on Instagram @podcastingforeducators

Sara Whittaker 0:01

I feel like there's two types of entrepreneurs, those of us who love looking at numbers and analyzing our data and those of us who avoid it like the plague. I used to be the latter. But I'm proud to say that this is something I've been working on and man, what a difference it makes. We have so much great information available to us as entrepreneurs that can give us the answers as to what to do next in our business, from our podcast data to social media numbers, to email lists, data and more. And that's what I'm talking about. In today's episode with my friend Allison. Allison is a metrics and data specialist who loves helping entrepreneurs use their numbers to make informed data driven decisions, using spreadsheets and dashboards. She's a former teacher who has always loved spreadsheets and collecting data. Ultimately, she wants you to know that you don't have to be a numbers person to understand and use those numbers to guide your business. Alison recently worked with me to create this amazing podcast metrics spreadsheet and dashboard that's included in my new audio course podcasts like you mean it. For those of us who really want to make our podcast a key player in our business. Our podcast hosts just don't give us all the information that we need to track our growth and our ROI. And that's why we created a custom resource that allows you to track all kinds of podcast numbers and other important things in your business. Like what you're promoting your revenue for these things and more. Because we really should be looking at these things together, not separately. And if you're listening to this episode in real time, the week that it airs, doors are open to podcasts like you mean it but only for a few more days. They close on Sunday, March 26, you can click the link in the show notes or in the episode description for this episode to get in while doors are still open. One of the bonuses is that when you join, you will get access to this of bonus podcast metrics bundle that Allison and I created together. Inside of this episode, we talk all about what numbers can do for your podcast and for your business. Why you should be tracking these things. And Alison shares how you can get into the routine of tracking numbers in your business. All right, let's go ahead and get to the episode. Your Podcast is a powerful tool that serves your audience and your business. But how do you manage it all bring in new listeners and convert those listeners into customers. That's what this show is all about. Welcome to podcasting for educators. I'm Sara Whitaker, classroom teacher turn podcast manager, and I'm here to help you get the most out of your show, all while making an impact on other educators. Alison, welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much for being here.

Allison 2:48

Thank you for having me. I'm very excited.

Sara Whittaker 2:50

I am very excited as well. I said this in the intro, but Alison and I work together she created this insane podcast metrics bundle for us that's in my new audio course. And it is just like next level for podcast tracking. I'll probably say this a million times in this interview, but I am not what you would consider a quote unquote, numbers person. That's a goal of mine is to really focus on my numbers this year and ongoing. So I feel like I've already learned so much from you. And I know that listeners are going to learn a lot from you too. So I'm just super pumped.

Allison 3:28

Sarah, thank you. I loved working on that project with you. I feel like I better understand the podcasting world now. And it was just super fun to collaborate together and just create a resource that works wonderfully to help make those numbers simpler and easier to access and understand.

Sara Whittaker 3:47

Yeah, absolutely. Podcast numbers are tricky, because it seems like we don't really get a lot of data from our podcast host. But if you know what to look for, we can create our own big spreadsheet like you did. So yeah, it's awesome. I hope that people who are listening are going to check that out because it is an amazing resource. And that's what we're going to be talking about today. Our numbers, podcast data, like the importance of actually tracking these things for your podcast and for your business as a whole to so let's start there. What can numbers do for our podcasts and for our bits, our businesses?

Allison 4:25

Yeah, numbers can do a lot. I think one of the biggest things they can do is they can just give your podcast and ultimately your business direction, and clarity on how to move forward and just pursue growth. And I think really help you better understand what does growth look like for your business and your podcast based on where you are right now, kind of as you were talking earlier, you do get not many pieces of data, but those pieces of data are super helpful. And just give you a lot of really good pieces of information to let you know what's going well and Like, what are some new strategies or things you could try to tweak to kind of see what happens in your podcasts in your business? Yeah, absolutely.

Sara Whittaker 5:07

I think so many times we try and keep, like so much up in our brain of how things are going. But it's amazing when you actually intentionally track these things and like, get it down on paper or Google spreadsheet of some sort, and really see like, what your results are from podcast episodes or launches that you've done and really help you make those data driven decisions. So this is kind of along the same lines, but why should we track our metrics?

Allison 5:42

I think one of the biggest reasons is what you just said, it gives you those data points to be able to make informed decisions, and not just feel like you're going with your gut. Or, like just guessing, right? Like, I don't really know, let's try this.

Sara Whittaker 5:56

Because that can be exhausting. Yeah. And scary.

Allison 5:59

Oh, terrifying. And then when things don't go? Well, I think it can also feel like I don't know what to do anymore of like, I've tried all the things I can think about. But tracking metrics is really just the way to help bring data back into like, give it the forefront of your, for your podcasts in your business. And I think we're both former teachers, like we use data all the time in the classroom, right? Like, you don't just launch into a new unit or a new concept or a new skill or move on without regularly, like taking some data points from your students. And I think we sometimes forget to take that same mindset and aspect and put it into our podcasts and our businesses.

Sara Whittaker 6:42

Yes, that is such a good point. And it's so true. Like all the assessments that we did, as teachers, I know, there's a lot of current and former teachers listening, all those meetings that we had to do those CLTs, where we sat down and looked at the data. And that's really what we should be doing in our business too. And I need to be doing more of that. I'm sure many of you can relate.

Allison 7:04

Oh, same. It's so easy for it to just kind of like get thrown onto the backburner of like, Oh, I'll look at the numbers later or whatever. And then you get halfway through the year or through a full course of the calendar year and realize I have nothing.

Sara Whittaker 7:18

Yeah. Yep, it's terrifying. And I've found to like, as I have become a little bit more intentional with numbers. It's helped me realize like how much I have grown over the years, I feel like when you are in the day to day, you're in the thick of it. It's easy to kind of go down this rabbit hole of like, Oh, I'm not like exactly where I want to be. But if you have those numbers to look at, oh, well, this is where I was a year ago or two years ago and look at where I am now. I feel like it can really help you celebrate all of the things that you've accomplished. Totally guess. So if somebody is, maybe they're feeling like I am where they really want to be a little bit more intentional about tracking their numbers in their podcasts, let's say, how would they even get started on doing that?

Allison 8:09

That's a great question. I think a big first part of getting started is really just kind of sitting down with your brain and your like mental thoughts of how do you see your numbers and like when you hear the word numbers or metrics, what comes to mind, and really just kind of flipping the script in your head of reminding yourself that your numbers are here to help you like they're not out to get you. They have such valuable information and like seeing them as a valuable asset to your business instead of just this like scary thing that you want to kind of hide off to the side. Sarah, you have some great podcasts that you've done previously on just talking about the different numbers that you can look at for your podcast. And they're incredible. So even just starting there to figure out like, what should you even be tracking. And I think something that I would also suggest as a tip is starting small, like don't go don't try to go from zero to 100 in like a day. It's not feasible. And as we want to strive for consistency with tracking data, because that consistent, being able to see what your numbers look like month after month, week after week, is really where the power can come in to making those informed decisions. Starting small and then kind of continually adding things in as you start to kind of get a grasp on things is super helpful.

Sara Whittaker 9:29

Yeah, like Alison mentioned, I have done previous episodes about specific numbers to track related to your podcast. So I'll link all of those in the show notes. I'd love to know if you don't mind like what are some in terms of your business? Like what are some big numbers that you recommend that people track their ongoing?

Allison 9:48

Great question. There are so many and I think it really starts to come down to what your business looks like. Specifically, you're going to have some different numbers that you focus on, but a great one That applies for every business owner is really just looking at your income and expenses. So I actually just created a spreadsheet and dashboard that helps you just have a place to track those numbers. Because it's really easy, especially if you are just getting started or don't have a super large amount of revenue coming in all the time, it's easy to kind of forget about logging those different numbers, but paying attention to how much money is coming into your business. And I like to break that number down even more, and look at with all of your services and all of your products, how much money comes from each specific service, each specific product to really just give you a better understanding of what services people are really interested in and what services are driving your business. And the same with expenses kind of breaking down your expenses and looking at are there subscriptions are software's or services that I'm spending a lot of money on every month, that really aren't helping draw money into my business? And just kind of looking at those two pieces of data combined to really just help see the heartbeat of your business of how are we doing? Are we making money? Are we bringing money in? Apart from Income and Expense numbers and data points. Another great place to look is just your TPT store? How many views is your TPT store getting? How many people are kind of showing up in a general course of time? How many sales are you making on your TPT store. And there's actually a way within your like teachers pay teacher's seller account to create custom links that you can like if you're promoting a certain product on a podcast episode, or on a blog post or in an email list, you can create super specific links that let you know how much traffic is coming from that source. I love helping business owners find ways to track their traffic source and just figure out like, where are people coming from? Because that just helps you know, like, where should I continue to promote my TPT products? Where should I continue to promote my podcast? If nobody is coming from Instagram? Like let me switch up my tactics? Because that's not that's not where I'm gonna get the most bang for my buck.

Yes. Now, you mentioned a dashboard. Can we talk a little bit about what is your process? Like? What does that look like? What tools do you use to track data monthly? And like, what is a dashboard? Because I know there's got it. I didn't know what a dashboard was before I met us. So I know there's gotta be some other people out there who also do not know.

I'm sure some people are being like dashboard like in my car, right? Like, what are we talking about? Don't worry, it's not that that would be weird. So strange, like, yeah, let me go analyze my data and my car dashboard.

Although I will say one of my favorite places to be, I don't know what it is. I've heard somebody else talk about this. So I know that this is a thing. If you're out running errands, or dropping your kid off at school, just like taking a few minutes in your car in your garage. It's just like the ultimate peaceful place. So hey, maybe sitting in your garage in your car is a good place to to check your numbers, just saying

I love that. Or that could be a reminder, right? Every time you get in the car and stare at your dashboard, say numbers.

Numbers. got to

start somewhere. Okay, yes. So like, what does this practically look like? What tools? Can you use all that good stuff. So when I think about tracking and analyzing numbers, I kind of break it down into some different steps, right? You want to first kind of figure out what do you want to be tracking? What numbers do you want to pay attention to? Is that going to be your sales from TPT? Is that going to be your podcast, download numbers, the number of email subscribers, the number of clicks from emails, all that good stuff. And if you're not quite sure where to start with that, I just love starting by asking questions. When Sarah and I were working together to build that tracker and dashboard bundle for the podcast. We really just started by asking questions like, Okay, Sarah, what? What numbers? What helps you figure out if your podcast is growing? Like what else we want to pay attention to? How do we know if an episode is doing well if the content is resonating with the audience? And those questions really just helped us uncover data points and metrics that we might not have originally thought of, including? Yes.

I love that you did that. Because I've never approached looking at data that way before like, Okay, what do we want to know? We want to know, like you said, if our content is resonating with people, what types of content is resonating them most? How long are people listening? Like asking those questions helped us figure out what numbers we even needed to be looking at. So that was just a really cool part of the process. And I

think it just helped create a product that was so well rounded, where it's not just looking at your download numbers, but it was kind of interlinking them with some other details and data points to kind of figure out like okay, cool. This episode had a lot of download numbers like why to really just help dig into that. Anyways, once you can to figure out what those questions are, what numbers do you want to start paying attention to? The next question you need to ask yourself is okay, how am I going to store this data, because if we want to be doing it consistently, you don't want to have to recreate the wheel every month, you go to sit down and be like, I can't remember what document I created this under, let me just start over. It's gonna just take way too much time and be frustrating, because then you don't have that source of data to look back on time after time again, and personally, coming from the education world, I love all things Google, because they're free, generally pretty, like easy to understand and use and really easy to share amongst how many other people your team might be. But I also know that there's ways to create graphs and tables and stuff in like air table, or Asana or clickup, or basically any thing you use, I would just encourage you to use something that you use often in your business. So you kind of know where it's at. With the tracking piece. I like using something like an Excel spreadsheet or a Google Sheet, something that really just allows me to really quickly have a format in place that reminds me what numbers I'm paying attention to. So like head column headings, and then each month, I can just go down the row of like, what's the date? How many podcasts did I launch this month? What are my download numbers for each of those things, overall things just to really make it simple. So I love Google Sheets for tracking. But then when it comes to analyzing when it comes to actually looking at those numbers and trying to figure out like, Okay, well, what does this mean? Spreadsheets are not always the go to, they get full very quickly. And they can start to kind of feel really overwhelming and just clunky. And just not not fast or easy. You can analyze with spreadsheets, right? But like, do we really want to Yeah, and I even think of like as a teacher, I would always like have some conditional formatting to make things pop up really easily. So that's where the dashboard comes in. And I love the dashboard, because it is basically just a one stop shop, where there is bar graphs, pie charts, kind of smaller tables that are more focused, even just like cards with little numbers on them. And really just a place for you to actually see what your data looks like. So instead of having to dig through rows and columns of data points that go on for months and miles, you can just pull up this dashboard and see like, Okay, with this bar graph, I can see all of my, like, overall downloads for each month throughout the course of this year. Or I can more specifically look into each episode and see the different like, one day seven day 30 Day download counts, to really kind of see which episodes were really taking off.

Yeah, one of the things that I one of my favorite things that we actually ended up adding at the end was what like what content pillar do these episodes fall into, and you made it into a pie chart. It's amazing, because like you said, if you're looking at that in a spreadsheet, it's like, okay, this is just like a bunch of different numbers or texts, or however your spreadsheets formatted. But seeing it in that visual representation as like, super quick, I can glance at this for two seconds and see that 80% of my episodes fall into this content pillar, I need to be talking about some of these other things, too. Or I was talking about this a lot more than I thought I was. So I just love it because it's so quick and easy to actually analyze the numbers and just get that quick snapshot.

Yes. And I think one of my other favorite parts of this dashboard that we were that we created, was also looking at, we created a whole page that just talks about this question, what products or services Am I promoting. And just because as a business owner, and as a TPT seller, you have so many products and resources and things that you're using your podcast to promote for all the time. But I think it's really easy to kind of accidentally fall into this rut of like only promoting one or two things instead of reminding yourself like I have all of these resources. And so very similar to looking at the content pillars, we also created a another pie chart that just has all of your different services listed. And you can just easily see at a glance like hmm, I'm spending 50% of my podcast time talking about this one service. And we also have a thing on there too of like, how much money is that even bringing in then you can start to kind of I just love the comparison of things of noticing like I am spending 50% of my like listeners time basically talking about this one product but nobody's buying it. So maybe I need to either change up the way I'm talking about it or maybe I need to go after this product or service that they are buying, and really spend more time talking about that,

yes. And that's something that you're just not, that's information that you're just not going to get from just looking inside of your podcast host or totally then just tracking your sales separately, like when you can, because the whole goal of this was to really connect your podcasts to your business and really make it all encompassing, so that you can see, okay, if I'm really promoting these things on my podcast, and in my email list, and on social media, then I can really look at how my sales are increasing as a whole. And it just came together in such a cool way. And it's just, I mean, I've never seen anything like it. And I feel like it just gives you such better information about what you should be spending your time on, and what people are really resonating with and what they're buying.

Totally, it helps you really make those informed decisions. And I think the beautiful thing is it, like it requires no extra work on your end of things like all you need to be doing is consistently tracking that data, which is the goal of us as business owners of what we're doing. Anyways, and then you can just kind of open up that dashboard when you sit down to analyze. The other thing I love about this dashboard Building Studio is like it's so interactive, you can change the date range to look at a specific month to look at a quarter to look at the entire year last year, depending on how much data you have all that good stuff. Or you can even choose a specific product or service and just look at, like all the data points for just that product or just that service or combine the two things and be like, Okay, I know, or at least I think I really focused on this product or service during these two months of time. Like, let me see how I actually did and if it converted the way that I was hoping it would. So it's just it's so excited.

It is so exciting. And I don't know if we mentioned this, but for anybody who's not the dashboard that Alison's talking about is called lookers studio. And it used to be called,

used to be called Google Data Studio that which I think makes more sense because it is a Google right. But for some reason, they just got rid of Yeah, so yeah.

But it links to the to your spreadsheet, where you're actually like inputting these numbers. So every time you input these numbers on your spreadsheet, it automatically updates on the dashboard, which is so

cool. It's just so fun. I just,

it is now to do all of this to track all of these things. And really be intentional with these numbers. Do you feel like you have to be a numbers person in order to keep up with all of this?

That is my favorite question. No, you don't? Like Absolutely not. A passion of mine is just really helping people understand and realize that you don't have to have a super mathy degree, you don't have to love numbers, like math could have been your least favorite thing ever. And you can still realize that you are still more than capable of not only tracking but also analyzing I think analyzing is sometimes this scary like, but I don't know numbers, I didn't go to math for stats like I didn't either. I still like elementary teacher over yes. Do not understand probability or statistics at all. But I think it's just really encouraging of like, our brain is almost hardwired to notice patterns. And when you are consistently like taking those few seconds to just track numbers, which is literally basically just copying and pasting, right, like, pull up your host platform, type in the numbers, and then pulling up the dashboard which just visualizes those number points for you, all you get to do is look back and say, Hmm, this bar is taller than the rest of them. Like let's figure out why. Yeah, so as long as you are curious about your business and wanting to make those informed decisions, you can do this

100% And I think my best tip is put it on your calendar that's what I have to do like last week of the month or first week of a new month look at last month data but put it for me that's actually writing it like I use kind of mix of digital and paper but I have to put it on my paper planner because those are the things if it goes in my paper planner is getting done because I need to physically be able to cross it off in order for me to be content.

I love that you are also a mix of the digital and there's just something it's not quite the same as like a check online. It's

not I need to I need that line. Cross it off. I feel so accomplished. I am that person who will if I did something that wasn't on my to do list I will put it on my to do list so that I can cross it off. Yeah

100% right there with you multiple things. Like I already did this that even little things like

get made coffee.

Drink Coffee, killin it differently. But with that I even encouraged people to split up the tracking and an Alice's parts of it like Make that two different. Then, like it just feels more bite sized. If you're trying to like ease into things take five minutes to track things. Take 10 minutes to analyze another day.

Yes. Awesome. Such good advice. I feel like we covered a lot of different things. And I feel like if you are somebody who has not, let me just get on my soapbox for a minute and say, if you're not tracking your podcast numbers at all, it is time to start. It's never too late to start, but it is time to start today. So yes, I will have links in the show notes if you want to check out this awesome pod, podcast metrics, bundle and any of Alison's other awesome resources, because she does have other templates for other pieces of your business. So Alison, where can people find you online? If they're if they want to connect with you? Yes,

I have a website as most people do. And it's just my name. So Alison J. Crystal, just k ry s l.com. Super straightforward. But then I also live on Instagram at Hello, underscore, Alison crystal, and I it's a fun place to be. I would love to just connect with you there and talk more about all the numbers. do love them.

Yes. Awesome. Yeah, you're you're so much fun to follow. So I will put all of those links in the show notes for everybody. And Allison, thank you so much. I really appreciate you being here.

Thank you for having me.

Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. To keep this conversation going connect with me on Instagram at podcasting for educators. I'm always looking for an excuse to talk about podcasting. If you're looking for support and launching, managing or growing your podcast, check out my online course the podcasting for educators prep school at podcasting for educators.com/prep school. I'll see you here next time.