Redd: Hello and welcome to Fiverrcast, the official Fiverr podcast for sellers, by sellers. My name is Redd AKA Reddhorrocks.Adam: And I’m Adam also known as Twistedweb123. Today we’re rejoined by guest Ryan who we had previously on the show. I believe it was episode 2, what is good customer service, which if you haven’t seen yet, I highly recommend checking out. Welcome back to the show Ryan.Ryan: It’s great to be back and also we had our episode – I think it was 16 in New York. We did the recap. So it hasn’t been that long.Redd: Yeah, absolutely. We’ve seen you a couple of times and in case you all are forgetting, our fabulous jingle is also made by Ryan.Ryan: That’s true. I guess technically I’m on every show.Redd: Yeah, pretty much. So today, we are going to talk about understanding analytics and on Fiverr, there are so many different options for analytics, different metrics that are tracked and different things to look at.One of the things that we wanted to do is talk about what all of that actually means. So what everything actually stands for and then also talk about how we personally use that and then later on we’re going to talk about some external ways that the three of us track our orders.So Adam, why don’t you lead off talking to us a little bit about – for our first couple of internal analytics things?Adam: OK. Well, because we’re talking analytics, it’s probably most appropriate to start with the actual analytics page on Fiverr from the sales dashboard. So I will basically start with the top bar of the sales analytics page which is the “earned this month,” “orders created,” “average selling price” and then obviously the rating based on that.So the “earned this month,” I’ve actually had a few people kind of question what this is and they’re not 100 percent sure what this figure is. So what this figure actualy is, it’s the earned this month amount based on the orders that have been marked as complete either automatically or via a review since the beginning of the calendar month.So whereas a lot of the other analytics over the last 30 days, this is literally from the first of each month and that is minus commission. So if you have say on the first of the month an order marked for complete for $5, your “earned this month” will increase by $4.Orders created are the total summary of all orders that have been received whether that’s completed, cancelled, delivered, currently in pending or even incomplete in regards to people actually giving that information.The average selling price is the average selling price of your Gig including Fiverr’s commission. So, most people will start off with roughly an average selling price as a new seller, as around $5 if they’re just offering a $5 basic service.If your average selling price right now is for example minus $15, that is including the commission, so realistically it’s actually 20 percent less than that is what I receive.The positive rating then is the – basically the percentage based on the stars you receive. So at the moment we have a star rating system going from one to five and one star is 20 percent. Two stars is 40 percent, three is 60, four 80, five a hundred obviously.So it’s the overall average of your five stars, your 4.5s, your 2s, et cetera, all put together to work out that overall percentage.Redd: So moving on then, there are a couple of other metrics on this page to look at. When you’re looking at your orders created on your sales analytics page, underneath that, you will see your Gig extra orders and this is how many of your orders had had extras associated with them. So someone ordered one Gig and they tacked on three extras, you would get credited for three with that.Multiple orders is for when someone ordered multiple units of your base Gig and then we have down there another one that people are a little iffy about is the not rated section of your reviews and not rated just means that the buyer in question didn’t actually leave you a review.Now on Fiverr, you only have 30 days to leave someone a review. So it’s entirely possible that they may have come back later and just unfortunately not been able to review because it has been too long.Then your orders’ cancelled percentage is how many orders you’ve had cancelled. This does not include mutual cancellations. This is other cancellations.Adam: So just to clarify that, when you say other cancellations, it’s something that was cancelled by Fiverr or a mutual cancelation that was sent through but wasn’t actually accepted and the order went through.Redd: Right.Ryan: I think to set the record straight, mutual cancellations are not negatively impacting your Gigs anymore. Is that correct?Redd: Yes, that is correct.Ryan: So below how much you’ve earned, you have active Gigs which are the Gigs that you have publicly showing to buyers that they can buy. This does not include the suspended Gigs or the Gigs that you have paused. It’s only the Gigs that are available for order.Next to that is “page views” which is how many times your actual profile has been viewed in the last 30 days. It’s not how many times your individual Gigs have been viewed but just the profile. So that would be – for example for my profile, it would be Fiverr.com/customdrumloops. It’s where your handle is.Next to that is Gigs saved which is how many people have viewed your Gig and then saved it to come back to later. You will see a little heart on the Gig page that when they click that, that is what saves the Gig and then next to that is your conversion rate which is how many Gig clicks you had, with how many people ordered that.So for example, if you had 100 Gig clicks and one person ordered, you would have a one percent conversion rate or be at five. It would be a five percent conversion rate. All of these metrics are in the last 30 days.Redd: And something to bear in mind when people are looking at conversions is a lot of people have a conversion rate that – they might consider it fairly low, like somewhere around like a three or four or five percent. That’s actually fairly high and pretty standard. So if you feel like your conversion rate is low and it’s over two percent, then you’re doing actually pretty well.Ryan: Right, and I think there’s a lot of other factors. I think people get down on conversion rate only but there are other things you can look at to improve other than just conversion rate to make more sales.Redd: So if we’re moving on to the “my Gigs” page, which is where you have a whole another slew of analytics, Adam, what are they going to find there?Adam: So the great thing about the “my Gigs” page is that it has been developed and expanded so much over the time Fiverr has existed and at the moment, the actual metrics available to us are available to break down not only by Gig but also if you want to by a daily amount and even farther back going anywhere from the last 30 days to the last 6 months.But to understand that data obviously, you’ve got to actually understand what it is we’re recording. So there are a few things to look out on the “my Gigs” page. The first one being impressions. Impressions are basically the amount of times you have shown up inside a search result.So if I search for voiceover and your Gig comes back inside the search results, that means you receive one impression. It doesn’t necessarily mean someone has clicked your Gig or looked at your Gig. It simply means that it was related to a search page or another page that they were on where your Gig was listed.Redd: So if someone was looking at like the main category page for voiceover and my particular Gig was there, that would count as an impression even though they hadn’t searched for me?Adam: That’s correct, because you’re inside the actual link and chances are they’ve actually chosen that filter in some way also to view that. Even the filters as simple as highest rated or anything along those lines. Also if you think about it, a filter is actually to go into the top menu and select “voiceover”.Redd: Got you.Adam: After that, then you have the clicks, which is the total number of unique clicks received inside the last 30-day period. So that means where someone has actually gone ahead and clicked your Gig or anything from these pages or search pages or anything from that and that’s simply unique.So at the moment for example on one of my Gigs, I see 1200 which means 1200 people have viewed that or clicked that, sorry. The views are then the amount of people who have viewed your Gig but this amount isn’t unique. That’s maybe why you see sometimes that you have let’s say 1200 clicks on one of my Gigs but 2700 views.That’s because people are viewing my Gig more than once, which is also a great metric to kind of understand. You then have the orders leading from that which is the amount of orders you received and then the cancellation ratio which we talked about is the same as on the analytics page, where it’s cancellations that are the ones which are mutual.Redd: So then if you’re drilling down further into that, if you want to look into – you’re opening it up and you’re looking more into what else you can search by if you want to change the date range, you can look again at your impressions, your clicks, your Gig views. You can also see your social Gig views, which is if for some reason your Gig has been shared on social media, how often that has happened. Then there’s another opportunity for you to see how many orders you’ve had and then there’s another opportunity for you to see your conversion rate by Gig.Adam: The great thing about breaking this down further as well and viewing those charts is whenever you make a significant change to your Gig, that is also stored in these metrics. So if I upload a video or change my video, on that day, the actual metric chart will have a little tool tip when you hover over it that says “Gig video changed” or meta – Gig meta information changed or Gig image added, et cetera.Then you can see from that point in time if your views or your Gigs or your orders have gone up from that. Then you will understand OK, maybe me changing my video worked with that.Ryan: The good thing is being able to track back to six months. I mean you don’t – you’re not just tracking it over a short period of time. You can really track it over a long extended period of time just to get an even better idea of what changes worked and what didn’t.Redd: So on the revenue page you have earned which is obviously the amount of money that you’ve earned and then the amount of money that you have withdrawn, used to order Gigs, pending clearance which is the amount of funds that have been marked as complete but haven’t yet cleared into your account. Available funds is obviously what’s getting ready for withdrawal and then up there at the top you’ve got the upcoming earnings metric. This is from all of the orders that are currently active, ones that you haven’t delivered on yet, ones that have been delivered and also ones that are incomplete and waiting for more information. So that encompasses all of those.Adam: Yeah, I think that’s an important one to mention because I’ve seen sometimes where people have said, “I have no orders in my queue but it says I have upcoming earnings,” or say $4 or $8, et cetera. If you’re in that situation, be sure to go to your “manage sales” page and have a look at any Gigs that are in priority, that they – they’re inside active and see if they’re incomplete and to try and chase up those buyers and see if you can get them to open up the order with the relevant information.What I’m basically saying is if you see their orders in your main queue to deliver, but you see money and upcoming earnings, that means at some point a buyer has ordered but they haven’t filled in the information. So you want to chase them up to make sure you can finish that order for them.Ryan: I think the last and obviously most important analytic that we haven’t touched on is the world domination chart.Redd: Yeah. So this is an overview of how many sales you’ve had for each country in the world. For the most part, it gives you a really good way to see where your clients are coming from.Ryan: It’s fun too.Redd: Yes.Ryan: It’s fun to look to see which countries you’ve had purchases in that might be a surprise and you can also look for trends there but I think it’s just fun looking at how much of the world you’ve dominated.Redd: I still want Greenland. I can’t get Greenland. I don’t know what’s going on but I want it so badly.Ryan: Next time I visit, I will order from my phone from you. Hopefully it tracks IP addresses.Redd: See, this is very much appreciated. Thank you Ryan. Go to Greenland for me, absolutely.Adam: It’s also worth mentioning as well with that map. It actually displays different colors for a quick view as well. The lighter the blue, it means the lesser orders from that location and the darker the blue, it means more orders. So for example my United States is very dark blue with over 10,000 whilst my Uzbekistan is very light blue with one. So that’s a nice little visual component to give you as well.Redd: So just a couple of other tiny little things just in case you are really, really looking to get the last of the analytics in. When you’re looking on your main screen, obviously your response rate is how many messages you’ve responded to in the last 30 days. Under “manage sales,” you have priority which are your orders that are in your queue. New are the ones that you have not opened and looked at. Active includes incomplete orders, so ones that are still waiting on information and then obviously late which I’m sure no one has, delivered, completed and then orders that were cancelled. Did we miss any? Is that all of them?Adam: I think we pretty much got everything there.Redd: Fantastic. All right. So let’s talk about how we use them. So for you Ryan, which is the one metric of all the ones we just talked about that you spend the most time looking at and/or agonizing over?Ryan: Surprisingly, I think to most, it would be clicks on the Gig just because I know how important that is to get the actual page exposed to people and I think that you would have a lot you can control in terms of how many clicks you get. I always like to look at it as keeping my title as short as possible and letting the reviews speak for themselves and hoping that when people see the title, it’s not some long, drawn out – a hundred-word title that’s optimized for search engines. It’s as basic as possible to get people to click.One of the reasons I focus on clicks is not only to hopefully convert on my page but Fiverr also does a great job at running your retargeted marketing campaigns for you. When someone clicks on your Gig, they will be retargeted when they’re on Facebook, when they’re on YouTube and the ads pop up and they will be shown your Gig again or also they will email out and say, “Hey, here’s the best explainer videos,” and it will be something that they viewed of yours in the past. So that’s the one metric that I really focus on.Adam: For me it’s actually – it’s a combination of two. It’s actually a relationship between two and that’s the clicks and the views and my most important metric is figuring out the difference between the clicks and the views and try to ascertain my kind of interest rate that my buyers have based on that.For example, if I have a lot of views and very little clicks, it means that my buyers are checking my Gig over and over and over again. If I go another step further to my orders, I can try to put that together. But if I’ve got 10 times the amount of views than I do my clicks, it means on average a buyer is checking out my Gig 10 times and that’s a really important metric for me to know because for me actually, the best possible thing there would be to have clicks and views almost equal and then orders coming based on that. So you know that the buyers are understanding everything that you’re offering. They’re understanding what you’re doing and they’re making their decision there and then whether it’s a yes or no decision and that information for me is invaluable.Redd: I’m actually very different to you guys. The metrics that I look at the most are my number of orders, my number of Gig extra orders and the number of orders I’ve delivered. I basically use that as a way to track trends and to see how things are going and to know how busy I am going to be at a particular given time so that I can kind of plan my schedule.So obviously my new orders is how well I’m performing and I relate that to things like how high my queue is and obviously what day of the week it is and the season, things like that.Then my Gig extra orders is important to me because I tend to make the bulk of my income from Gig extra orders because that’s when people are purchasing faster delivery. That’s when people are purchasing from me things like background music, stuff like that.So I like to see how popular all of my extras are currently in general and that way if I’m adding something or taking something away, I can see how that relates to the amount that is ordered.Then delivered orders is just I’m very, very self-competitive. So I try really hard to always beat the day before unless of course it’s a weekend and I just don’t have as much work to do.Adam: That’s really interesting because I would say me and Ryan are kind of using metrics to kind of track or monitor where that next sale is coming in whereas you seem to be using them for that purpose as well. But it also seems to be more of a focus on improving your workflow along with that and understanding your workflow with how your orders are coming in as opposed to just trying to ascertain those new orders.Redd: Exactly. That’s really how I use the analytics for me. It’s just basically to see exactly what I’m doing and where I’m spending my time and things like that because honestly for me personally, I don’t make a whole lot of tweaks to anything else. So it’s basically I change how I’m doing things rather than how people are finding me.Ryan: I think that’s the great part about the way that the analytics are laid out is you can have two people that think and do things in a completely different way. Yeah, there’s metrics for both of them to improve their Gig, just depending on what they like to do. For some, it’s more data-driven. Other, it’s more time-driven. So it’s nice to have that variety on the backend to be able to do it in the way you want to do it.Adam: Yeah. I mean I’m sure there are actually people out there when they look at their analytics, what they’re actually looking for is for the new orders to be actualy relatively low and their average selling price to be higher. So I mean I’m kind of there – when I see my average selling price go up, I think, wait, it has gone up. But it’s not my focus and I kind of – the more orders I receive, I like to receive that.But as you say, there’s the same kind of data there but different ways of viewing it where others may say, “I’m not actually looking to receive that many orders because my key here is increasing my selling price by minimizing the amount of orders that I receive.”Ryan: Right. I mean I think the Gig price and the average price has a lot to do with even conversion rates because like for the explainer videos, the minimum price is $50. So if I get a conversion rate above two percent, I’m ecstatic by that. But for someone like Redd where like she said she uses her Gig extras more, she might go for a higher conversion rate on the base order and hope that she can sell more Gig extras. So Gig by Gig, it just depends on what your goal is and what you’re trying to sell and how you’re trying to sell it.Redd: Exactly. I think a lot of it is based on your category too, but a lot of it is kind of your personal disposition. I mean I know Ryan, you’re very – a very marketing-minded individual and then Adam, you’re very, very cerebral when it comes to computer programming and anything like that. But for me, I’m a little bit more on the – not exactly the artistic side but more like that. So I think it’s – a lot of it is your mindset and your category and just how you’re geared towards your work.Adam: I think coming back to one of the most important parts of the analytics as well is I always kind of – coming from that kind of marketing point of view, I always think one of the most important things of any analytic anywhere you’re doing it, whether it’s Fiverr or even in real life to a degree, is the most important thing for me is actually looking at my conversions because whenever I’m doing something, I always think it’s important you kind of nail your conversions first because if you’ve got a low conversion rate of say 0.1 percent, you need to get a million people to look at your stuff. But if you’re converting that low, you’re just not going to have the same effect.Redd: Yeah, exactly. I mean that’s the thing. If you’ve got a lot of people looking at your order, looking at your Gigs and they’re not ordering, then obviously there’s something that’s putting them off once they get to your page and you need to see if you can figure out what that is to increase that conversion.Adam: Yeah. I mean I see a lot of people kind of asking in the forum. How do I get my Gigs seen more? How do I increase my orders? How do I get higher in search results? How do I get more traffic?Before you focus on getting hundreds and thousands of views and all of this traffic, the most important thing for you to focus on is that conversion rate because if you’ve got say a three or four or five percent conversion rate, as we’ve said, that’s actually a very good conversion rate.Now that would be fantastic if you got a thousand people look at your Gig and you had that conversion whereas if you had a 0.1, 0.2, less one percent, then whilst you would receive orders with a thousand people, you could be just doing so much more and that should be kind of like a red flag to you that it’s not about the traffic coming on. It’s about the conversion that you’re making and you’re already making OK sales at the moment because your traffic is so high. You could be doing so much better if your conversion rate was better, which is usually an indication of something on your Gig needs to be tweaked, whether it’s not being explained very well or it’s not presented in the best possible way. I think conversions are the keyest kind of indicator of how well your Gig is doing because it doesn’t so matter if like I say you got a thousand people looking at your Gig or 10 people looking at your Gig. The conversion is the really important aspects that tell you from the sample group if your Gig is viable.Ryan: So let me ask you about this question. What do you think is the driving factor behind increasing your conversion? Do you think the video is the most important thing? Do you think your reviews are the most important thing? Do you think it’s the way you structure your Gig extras? Just to get your opinions, what do you think?Redd: All of them. Unfortunately all of the above.Ryan: Well, there has got to be one that you think does more than the other.Adam: For me, it’s the rule of overrule. Keeping the Gig transparent and simple. Now I want to give you an actual case study here of my logo design Gig.On my logo design Gig, this was way before packages came out. On my logo design Gig, I usually say I will create your logo for $5. Then all of my extras were I will give you the PSD source file. I will give you the AI vector file. I will make a website fave icon. I will give you font information. Those were the extras. The Gig did OK. It didn’t do brilliantly. I then changed that and I simplified it massively and I said I will design your logo for $5 and I will give you gold package, silver package, bronze package and those were extras.Now I explained what those packages were elsewhere on the Gig but for the layman who just wanted to order and you automatically understand that gold is obviously clearly better than bronze, it simplified the whole process and my conversions went through the roof. They went from about 1 to 2 percent to 15 to 16 percent and that’s where they currently are at the moment.My logo Gig is the highest converting Gig I’ve ever had and it’s because I’ve simplified it for the buying trend. I mean they can look into the details of it and see if they got the PSD or whatever they need but by just keeping it simple and with layman’s terms, they can automatically understand that gold is better than bronze in the same way if I was offering video, whilst you want to highlight certain things like HD video, if you’re saying to the buyer, you got to get this source file, you got to get the – mapping the audio and you’re going to receive all these other stuff, that’s great, but it adds confusion for the buyer who just want a great product.So the thing that made my conversions go up and the thing I truly believe is it’s all about keeping the Gig transparent, so they know what they’re receiving but making it very simplified so it’s easy to understand and order from.Ryan: You know, I think that’s really interesting and I for my video Gigs encourage sellers to send me a message first. So I quote them as the overall package through a custom offer 95 percent of the time and doing that is so much easier because when you lay out your Gig extras, they might not know what a watermark is. They might not understand what does HD make a difference on. Does it make a difference on the phone or a big screen? I think when you can put all of it in front of them like that, especially for something like logos or videos, if you look at 20 different sellers, all the logos are going to sort of start looking the same just because you do such a wide variety of projects and when you have something laid out easily like that, I think it makes it easy to understand and they appreciate it from a communications standpoint, which would make them more likely to want to buy from you.Adam: Exactly. They’re not just coming to your Gig for the deliverable. But they’re coming to the Gig for the fact that you have the knowledge or the expert in this subject. So when you’re giving them so many different options, if you’re saying, “Do you want HD or do you want it like this or do you want it like this or do you want me to do this?” et cetera, all I can think in my mind is the buyer is going, “I trust you. You’re the expert. Give me what you’ve got.”So where I split mine down into different tiers of bronze, silver and gold, I kind of put the orders for the buyer and say, “Do you want the smaller package, the middle package or the best package?” So people just opt in for the best one, not even fully checking what’s in there because they just go, “Right, I like his work. I want him to take control of everything,” and just order it.Ryan: It’s funny. One of my biggest experimental failures on Fiverr was when people would send me a message about a quote inquiry and I put together this questionnaire for them to answer. Do you want custom colors? Do you want HD? Do you want – I had a whole list of questions and I found that that was a huge mistake because they would be like, “Oh well, what’s the difference between this and this?” It basically created a whole new questionnaire that they sent back to me and I scrapped that after about three or four days of it. But it’s funny when you’re the expert. It shouldn’t be too much about asking them what they want. Obviously you want to understand the nature of the project. But when it comes to suggesting what they purchased, a lot of times I just want to lay it out in an easy-to-look-at package.Redd: Yeah, exactly. If you’re giving people a really clear presentation of all of their options, then especially if they don’t have to come to you with questions, that’s going to make them much more likely to order quickly because if they understand everything, then they require no clarification. There’s no back and forth with messaging, no nothing like that and it’s just like, OK, let me order. I’m done. We’re good. Let’s go.Adam: It’s very true because people may think, well, it’s not going to take much longer for them to contact me or get in touch with me. But the truth is if I’m browsing multiple services and I’ve got questions on one, and the other seems to answer everything straight away and it’s the exact same service, to save time and much more likely just to order that service that covers everything as opposed to one where I need to reach out to them because although – for all we know, the seller may respond within five minutes.You don’t actually know that as a buyer. You don’t necessarily know they’re going to respond instantly and when it becomes more of a thought process and the process is delayed and slowed down, I think that’s where that affects your conversions and actually interestingly, a lot of people have kind of brought up the topic as well about, “Well, why don’t we allow sellers to opt in to people buying from them?” Like accept or deny or confirm or reject an order. Why don’t we allow that?And I think that would completely decimate conversions in general because a buyer would be placing their order and they’re waiting around for five minutes, two hours, five hours to wait and see if something has actualy happened and it’s actually moving forward.So the whole thing of keeping it simple, straightforward so the buyer can just come on especially with things like the Fiverr app now, where they can just browse, click and they’re done, that really leads to the conversions and your Gig I believe should kind of tailor to that way.Ryan: Yeah, I mean I agree. I think that that leads to an atmosphere of negativity. Adam, you’re so busy. If I really wanted to order a project from you and you denied it, I might get offended. What am I doing wrong? Why don’t you want to work with me? When it might just be due to the fact that you’re too busy and I think that that is not something that the site wants to put out. We all want to work with everybody and if you can accept them, reject, that kind of leads to an odd separation between the buyer and the seller.Redd: The other problem with that too if you did it would be what if someone decides that they’re going to go ahead and they’re going to put in an order with six different people and then which ever one gets accepted first that’s the one that they’re going to go with. Then they’re going to have to go back through and basically remove the proposals for everything else and it could – I could just imagine that being an absolute logistical nightmare.Ryan: Yeah.Adam: Yeah. It just basically creates a lot of uncertainty where when you’re placing your order, you don’t actually know if it’s going to proceed or not.Redd: So all in all, we’re pretty glad that Fiverr doesn’t do that.Ryan: Getting back to analytics, do either of you use anything off Fiverr to track your analytics?Redd: Well, I will start that one because my analytics method is ridiculous. I’m sure you guys have much better systems than me. I have a notebook. I have two notebooks and I track a lot of different things in my notebooks.The main thing that I do is I write down at the end of every month what – how much I have earned that month and then I look and see if I actually took any days off that month, remove them from the number and then factor that out so that I know exactly how much money I made per day because there are different amounts of days in different months. It gives me an idea of whether or not this particular month was honestly better than last month because I can see whether or not my per day income has increased and that’s how I also factor what kind of impact it would have if I decided to take time off.So I have that and then I have another notebook where I literally track for every single day of the week how many orders I received that day and the reason I do that is because I can basically say, OK, today is Tuesday. Today I normally get about 35 orders but today, I’ve only gotten 22 orders. I can go back through and look at all of my Tuesdays and see when like – when that trend occurred and it’s basically a way for me to keep on track and not drive myself crazy by seeing whether or not I’m getting more orders than normal or less orders than normal.I can kind of go through and look at a representative trend. I’m personally very into seeing how I’m performing on a day to day, week to week, month to month, year to year basis. So yeah, paper, pencil, that’s me. I’m really dull. So Adam, what do you do?Adam: So I have two elements to mine. I have the tracking of revenues like you’re doing. Then I have the tracking of orders live so to speak. So for the tracking of revenues, what I actually do is each month I go to the revenues page and I export, usually export via CSV the amount cleared inside the previous month.Then I put that into an Excel spreadsheet, count it all up and get the summary and then I basically – I don’t cross-reference that from the month before because I understand that there are different trends throughout different times of the year. Like January is normally quieter for me than November, et cetera.So I actually match that against the previous year and then the year before that. So if I look at this year as an example, there’s a certain figure. I can see if it’s less or higher than this time last year and then the year before that. Then the overall objective there is if – it’s one of these small gains things where you have a system called “small gains” where you try to make small improvements to overall improve everything.The idea is if I break it down by month, and as you say, you can even break it down by day, if I’m doing better and better over each month, even if it’s just a small bit, overall then the whole year is going to be better. Then I kind of give myself the invigoration if you like that if my January is really quiet and my February is really quiet, it doesn’t matter if it’s still better than last January and February that may have also been really quiet.So you don’t go in there thinking, oh, I had an absolutely fantastic end of the year, December, November. It was so good but January is dead because that for me is the trend of that year and rather than dwelling on it, I think it is so much less than December when I was so busy, I actually look at it and think, well, it’s less but it’s more than last January and that really helps me kind of focus and that’s kind of like the overall tracking that I do in regards to the yearly basis.Then I come down to the day by day tracking where I’ve actually built a WordPress plugin or dashboard where each time I complete an order, I put it inside the system. I have a daily goal that I wish to earn each day and it basically – it feeds back to me in the simplest terms, how long it takes me to create a Gig, how much I earned for that day after commission, how much I earned for that week, how much I’ve earned for the year or over time, et cetera, average order price overall, average order price of my individual Gigs and a whole bunch of other stuff.So I mean my average order price at the moment as I said earlier is like $15 but I can look at other Gigs and see some Gigs are lower than that but then they’ve got Gigs that also are a lot higher than that. So again it gives me a bit of invigoration there thinking, well, it may be 15 and I was on the site for a very long time where we didn’t even have extras but it’s great to see now that my literal number of like the last 30 days is higher than that and it kind of gives you a constant goal to always try and beat as opposed to kind of sitting on old time stats if you like.So using that dashboard, I pretty much try to track everything, so I can basically work out average orders, average order amounts, how many orders are coming through, how many orders I’m delivering and just a whole host of other things really to track in the same way that you kind of do Redd to make sure that I’m improving or at least staying consistent if you like on a day to day, week to week basis. How about you Ryan? Do you use an external tracking?Ryan: Yeah, I’m old school like Redd. I get out my sundial and my abacus and track how long it takes. Now I do use a couple of tools. One of the big ones is IFTTT which is IFTTT.com. It stands for “if this, then that” and basically you can set up these formulas where if I get an order on Fiverr, then it sends that order in the information including the price, the buyer, the date and everything like that to a Google spreadsheet.So from there at the end of the month, I can go through and automatically calculate the average order price and I can see how that varies from month to month. I can see which days were bigger. I can see which buyers were repeat buyers and different things like that. That has been a very helpful tool and then also along with what Redd does, I actually do track time writing it down. I actually type it in the Google document as well. But to know how much time you spend on an order, that helps you know how much revenue you’re making both per order and per hour just because when the volume goes up, there’s time spent answering messages. There’s time spent doing revisions and there’s time spent doing new orders.I think if these get thrown out of balance, it majorly impacts productivity. So if I’m on top of those numbers and know baseline for what I should be at, I can track and make adjustments depending on the month or the week or the day or whatever and like Redd mentioned, you can look for trends like why was this Monday slower. Oh, it was the day after the Super Bowl or different things like that where orders or whatever is out of the normal is happening. By tracking, you can start to see patterns and figure out what you can do to prevent those slower times.Redd: Or basically prevent yourself from going completely insane if something happens that might seem like it doesn’t have a related cause but it actually really does. You just need to look outside of the box a little bit.Ryan: Right. And the more you have written down, the easier it is to do that versus just taking guesses as to why that’s happening.Adam: I think IFTTT is a fantastic tool. I remember when Fiverr first teamed up with them and launched their app on there. It’s great for analytics. Like you say, we can have information sent to spreadsheets and I dabbled before where I had information sent to spreadsheets and then I used another app on IFTTT to have that information sent to my website to kind of like complete the circle. I think it’s also worth mentioning that IFTTT has so many other things with the whole “if this, then that” and Fiverr where if you’re looking at promotion and marketing and other elements as well, I don’t really get too far into that. But definitely have a look at IFTTT because you can automate so many processes, such as if you want to refer back to – we talked about social shares on the analytics page. There’s actually a recipe they called on IFTTT where if you receive a new order, send out a tweet, so you can actually send out marketing tweets and stuff and then kind of use those tools back on Fiverr with the analytics to track how your new orders are affecting your IFTTT marketing coming back into your Gig and I highly recommend for anyone listening to definitely check out IFTTT because there’s so much available with the Fiverr app on it.Ryan: You can also look at time management tools as apps as well. I know Timely is one and I know there are few others out there. But if you don’t want to write it down manually, you can do the whole start and stop with the stopwatch.Redd: Yeah. I used to use a – I don’t do it so much anymore but when I was trying to figure out how much time I was spending in the studio every day, I would basically just start a timer on my phone and then when I was stopping, I would pause it and keep going to actually see how much time I was spending recording every day.Now I break it down into more like I know that I record on this – like on a Monday, I will always record from 10:00 AM to 12:00 PM in a straight stretch with no breaks and things like that. But there are different ways that you can do it both low tech and high tech.Ryan: I think all of these both on Fiverr analytics and off Fiverr, it all comes down to finding a system that works for you but also a system you can stick with because if you don’t – if you only try something for a week writing down the times, it’s not going to be a large enough sample size to make improvements and Redd price wise, we obviously have very different models and things like that in how we make more money.So having a formula for what you’re going to do and what you plan to do is very important in terms of moving into the future and making those improvements. Redd, do you have any advice for new sellers or sellers looking to grow their Gigs that might not be familiar with analytics, what they should do first or what they should focus on?Redd: Yeah. I think one of the most important things is focusing on your response rate because that’s basically about your communication with your clients, how quickly you’re replying to all inquiries and making sure that you really are speaking to everyone who is a potential buyer. So for me, I think the first thing to do is make sure your response rate is high and try really hard to keep that high because as a new seller, you’re going to want to ensure that you’re taking every opportunity in order to gain more sales and handle things that way. So I would say, yeah, definitely response rate. What about you Adam? What would be your analytic guide for a new seller? Which ones should they keep an eye on?Adam: I would personally say don’t pay too much attention to the impressions. Pay some of your attention to the clicks to see how people are clicking through, to see if you’re standing out in search results. But the biggest thing you need to pay attention to as a new seller is your conversions because based on that, you can basically see the end game of when people are looking at your Gig, do they want to buy it?A lot of new sellers can kind of get hung up on – I’m not showing a lot in search or my impressions are low, et cetera. But as I’ve said, it doesn’t matter how high your impressions are if you’re not going to convert them.So for me the most important thing is to kind of keep with those conversions and see what you can do to improve that, which kind of comes back to what you say about the response time and being engaging with your buyers, et cetera, because the feedback you’re going to receive from that and information, et cetera, you’re going to receive from that is also going to help with your conversions as well.There are a lot of things I factor into that but I would simply say to new sellers, don’t panic so much about getting big numbers. Work with the numbers that you have to sort your conversions and then go from there.Ryan: I would say focus on quality as well. So when you put your best work out in your Gig video and really work on getting the five-star reviews and having your turnaround time quick, when those things bump up, you’re going to start getting bigger sample sizes in your Gig in front of more people as well.Redd: All right. Well, that has pretty much covered everything and that’s about all we have time for today. If we missed anything or there’s anything else you want to ask us about, feel free to comment on the forum. We always keep an eye on our podcast comments so we can reply to you if we’ve missed something or something you want more details about.Thank you so much to Ryan for joining us today. You can find him on Fiverr as Customdrumloops. He also made our fantastic jingle and we were edited today by Dansha. Thanks so much everyone. We will see you next week.Transcription by: Trans-Expert
