Turn your numbers into a weekly to-do list

Dashboards are good at telling you what happened. They’re much worse at telling you what to do on Monday morning. So you look, you nod, you close the tab, and nothing changes.

The fix is to end every look at your numbers with a short list of actions. Not insights: actions, the kind you can do this week and check next week.

Here’s a routine that does that in about twenty minutes, and the six questions worth asking every time.

The six questions

Each question points at a different kind of action. Ask them in this order.

1. Which channel is worth the most per visitor? Not the one with the most traffic: the one where each visitor brings in the most money. If one stands well above the rest, the action is to do more there. Revenue per visitor explains how to read it.

2. Which busy page converts far below your average? A page with lots of visitors and a weak conversion rate is where a fix pays the most, simply because so many people see it.

3. Which step loses the most people on the way to paying? If most visitors look at a product and few start checkout, that’s the step to work on. Find where buyers drop off shows how to see it.

4. Which source dropped compared with last time? A channel that sent 600 visitors last month and 200 this month (an example) deserves a question. Did a post stop being shown? Did a link break? Did a newsletter skip a week?

5. Is a test ready to call? An A/B test with a clear winner that’s still running is leaving money on the table. Ship the winner and start the next test.

6. Are sales slipping through untraced? If a chunk of your sales can’t be tied to a visit, every answer above is missing part of the picture. Fixing the tracking makes every other number more trustworthy.

Rank what you find

You’ll usually find more than you can do. Rank it by three things.

• Size: how many visitors or how much money it touches. A page seen by 5,000 people a month beats one seen by 200.
• Gap: how far it sits from your normal. A page converting at a quarter of your average has more room to grow than one slightly below it.
• Confidence: how many people the number rests on. Twelve visitors aren’t a trend.

A handy way to combine size and gap is to ask how many buyers a page would bring if it converted at your average. Say your site converts at 2% overall (example numbers). Your pricing page gets 4,000 visitors a month and converts at 0.5%. Your about page gets 600 and converts at 0.2%. At the average, the pricing page would bring about 60 more buyers a month, the about page about 11. Fix pricing first, even though the about page looks worse.

Write actions you can check

A good action is specific, and comes with a way to know whether it worked. Compare:

• Vague: “Improve the pricing page.”
• Useful: “Move the Buy button to the top of the pricing page on phones, then check its conversion on phones in two weeks.”
• Vague: “Post more on YouTube.”
• Useful: “Post two more videos like the one that sold seven copies, each with its own tracked link.”

Keep the list to one to three items. Any more and none of them get done.

An example week

Here’s what a finished list might look like (example numbers):

1. Do more on YouTube. Visitors from YouTube were worth $1.40 each this month, against $0.45 across the site. Post two more tutorials, each with its own link.
2. Fix checkout on phones. 82% of phone visitors who open a product leave before checkout, against 61% on computers. Test the Buy button higher up the page.
3. Ship headline B. Its test has a clear winner after three weeks. Make it permanent and remove the test.

Next week, start by checking these three. Then ask the six questions again.

How odo does it

odo asks the six questions for you. Next moves is a card on your dashboard with ranked, plain-language suggestions, each with the numbers behind it:

• a channel whose visitors are worth far more than average, to double down on
• a busy page converting well below your average
• the funnel step losing the most people
• a source that dropped compared with the last period
• an A/B test with a winner ready to ship
• sales that aren’t traced to a visit yet, and how to fix that

You still decide what to do. odo just does the looking, so it gets done even in the weeks you forget. For the sixth question, the Sales from visits card also tells you, any time, what share of your payments were traced to a visit.

For more detail, the weekly summary arrives every Monday in Slack, Discord, Telegram or email with your week, its best day and where a visitor was worth the most. And an AI assistant connected to odo can run a full weekly review that ends with three things to try: see ask Claude or ChatGPT about your sales.