How to read your Monday metrics in ten minutes
A simple routine for turning a dashboard into a decision before your first meeting.
Most teams open their dashboard on Monday, scroll for a while and close it without deciding anything. Here is a routine that takes ten minutes and ends with one decision.
Start with change, not totals
A total tells you where you are. A change tells you what to do. Open the last 7 days view and look at three numbers only: visitors, signups and revenue. For each one, ask a single question: is it up or down against the week before?
Find the one thing that moved
If visitors are down, open the traffic sources and look for the biggest drop. If signups are down while visitors are steady, the problem is on the page, not in the channel. Orbit's Ask Orbit box can answer this in plain English, but you can do it by eye in a minute.
- Visitors down, one source down: a channel problem
- Visitors steady, signups down: a conversion problem
- Both up: write down what you shipped last week
Write the decision down
End by writing one sentence: "This week we will ___ because ___." Put it in your team channel. Next Monday you will know whether it worked.
A dashboard is only useful if it changes what you do on Tuesday.
If you want the routine to happen without remembering it, switch on the weekly report in your settings and Orbit will send this summary to your inbox.