How to measure the success of your growth efforts

Organic growth ≠ organic traffic.

Because if it was, we’d be evaluating a company’s growth by its traffic count.

So with vanity metrics out of the way, how do you measure the success of your growth efforts?

Simple, use these 5 growth principles:

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📌 1/ Start by identifying your growth goals and KPIs.

Your goals and KPIs are not the same thing.

Look at it like this: The goal is your destination, and the KPI is your personal driver.

💡 Example:

Goal: Increase MRR to $100k before the end of the 3rd quarter.

KPIs: Number of demos booked, blog traffic conversions, number of paid vs trial accounts.

📌 2/ Next, track and note down your baseline metrics

You need to assess your current growth level before implementing new strategies.

Grab a pen and paper and note down metrics such as your traffic count, conversion rate, churn rate, retention rate, social following— and any other important metric that’ll move the needle.

The goal is to get a clearer picture of where you’re currently and where you want to be in like 6-8 months.

📌 3/ Evaluate your progress to align with your goals

Compare your baseline metrics with your current one, and see if you’ve made progress.

For example, if you plan to increase your website traffic organically, you might want to track these metrics weekly (or monthly):

💡No. of website visits

💡Bounce rate

💡Average time on site

💡Pageviews

⚠️ WARNING! There’s a slippery slope when doing this.

For one, some implementations take time to show results.

So, don’t be quick to stop a strategy unless you’ve verified that it’s not working.

And once you see little to no change, adjust your strategy and course-correct when needed.

📌 4/ Analyze both working and non-working strategies

Seek out trends and patterns in strategies that worked and those that failed.

For example, let’s say your website traffic increased by 30% in the last month, leading to a 5% increase in conversions.

You might want to analyze possible triggers such as:

💡 The channels you promote your content on (moved from newsletters to slack channels?)

💡 Type of content you’re publishing (switched from short-form to long-form content?)

💡 Keywords you’re targeting (switched from KD 46 to KD 20?)

Your aim here is to find a correlation between the action and the result and double down on it to make informed decisions.

📌 5/ A/B Test continuously

You can only discover new growth opportunities when you step out of your comfort zone.

Try new things and see their impact on your growth.

For example, you can try:

💡 Posting at a different time or day of the week and compare your engagements.

💡Or, experimenting with different types of content formats (video-based, blog to podcasts, social media content to Instagram reels) and see which one garners the most likes and comments.

📌 Wrapping it up; Organic growth is an ongoing process.

You need to continuously track your process and make adjustments that align with your goals.

Don’t complicate the process. Just do what works.