In the same way the EKG or the medical monitor at the doctor's office reports your health and physical condition, so too do business statistics keep you in the know as to the health of your Amazon business.
In many ways statistics are the medical monitors and EKGs of the business world.
But what exactly should you be monitoring?
There are any number of metrics to pay attention to. Saturation of information is a very real possibility in the management of any business. Statistical awareness of each aspect of your company is important, and you can get quite granular with any particular area. Ultimately the things you choose to monitor will be up to you.
Tools like ManageByStats can help. MBS is focused on statistical oversight and analysis in the world of Amazon. As you add products, marketplaces and, even, additional Amazon seller accounts, maintaining the altitude needed in order to effectively monitor and know, clearly, how each aspect of your enterprise is doing becomes more and more vital.
It therefore becomes important to know what to watch.
Statistics, or stats, give you the insight you need in order to make adjustments to a particular area in order to "raise the stats", or drive the trend up. Doing this impacts that specific area, which can also impact other, related areas of the business.
KPIs, or Key Performance Indicators, are also statistics, but these are statistics which tend to encompass a larger sphere of importance, usually impacting a greater portion of the business.
A Key Performance Indicator is a value that demonstrates how effectively your company is achieving its key business objectives. Organizations use KPIs at multiple levels to evaluate their success at reaching targets. KPIs, like the EKG or the medical monitor, can give you an excellent overview of the overall health of your business. Using KPIs brings focus to what can be a large amount of information, letting you see clearly how things are going.
Multiple metrics could be named KPIs and monitored routinely to check your corporate health. From years of evaluation and working with thousands of Amazon sellers, we've isolated four (4) as the most effective overall, and present these here as the best indicators of how your Amazon business is doing.
KPIs are the next evolution of the quest to blend at-a-glance management info with deep-dive information and stats. KPIs give you a quick look at how you're doing overall.
The KPI statistics we recommend you use are:
Tracking trends for these four metrics gives a good indication of the real-time health of your Amazon business.
Sessions and Conversion Percentage show traffic to your Amazon listings and how well those listings are turning into sales.
Profit shows the profitability of the account, and Average Review gives an indication of how the products are doing in terms of customer response.
These four metrics have been shown to be key for taking the pulse of your Amazon business.