How to display your stats in a personalized dashboard, as your screensaver, so you’re always aware of where your business stands.

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Hey, folks! Michelle MacPhearson here. It’s another quick episode of the Michelle MacPhearson Show, and I wanted to show you what I’ve been using to keep myself motivated.

It is a quick little hack that you can get set up in about a half an hour from start to finish and I think that it will help you keep your business on track this year.

So what we’re using is Geckoboard (use my link for 10% off), which is a stats dashboard. It allows you to display stats from a lot of services that we all use. And then, because I’m not super good at remembering to go check my Geckoboard every day, I’ve actually set it up to display as my screensaver. So every time I get in a conversation or otherwise take a break from the computer, I’m able to see my stats as they pop up. In that way, I am reminded to check them every single day – and in this case, actually multiple times a day because there they are on my screen, right?

One of the things for me with dashboards and reports and stuff like that, if I get a report in the email over a PDF or even just in an email, I’m probably not going to open it. I’m going to thank, “Argh, that’s my daily report with stats…†but I don’t really take the time that I should to review it. And so this has been a huge solution for me and I think that it might be helpful for you too.

To give you an idea of some of the stuff that you can do with Geckoboard and that you can get it to display, mine right now shows my time and it also shows Philippines time because my team is in the Philippines. So that gives me a quick look at what time it is there, are people up yet, are they working yet.

It tells me Aweber subscribers today versus yesterday and Aweber total subscribers.

It syncs with ZenDesk, so I’m able to see the current active tickets, how many tickets are waiting, the average reply time, average request or wait time, all of those kinds of stats so that I know what kind of activity we’re seeing in our support desk and how well that activity or those requests are being handled.

It enables me to see traffic from Google Analytics to my websites. I’m able to see conversions from my website, so I’m able to see, “Oh, okay. We’re making sales on this particular product, but not this one so much. Maybe we should ramp up promotions or that.â€

I have a productivity score. This taps into my RescueTime, which is another tool that I use to keep myself on track.

And then I’ve also got a lot of social stats – YouTube views (I’m nearing 1.5 million!), Facebook likes, new Facebook likes, engaged Facebook users, Twitter followers and that kind of stuff.

In addition, it can take in RSS feeds. With that, I’ve got my most recent blog posts and then I also have the RSS feed from my project management system, so I can see the tasks that are being worked on, the comments on those tasks, that kind of thing.

And Geckoboard does a ton more. It’ll hook in with your InfusionSoft and get you a lot of sales data if that’s the kind of stuff you’re looking for, tons of other services that you may be using.

It’s really helped me force myself to look at these numbers every single day. When I see a drop in traffic or when I see a gap in sales or when I see that I have less subscribers today than I did yesterday, it motivates me to get to work and get those numbers up.

You always want to see the little green arrows pointing up. That’s how Geckoboard displays data – the red arrows point down if things are going down. So I want to see more green arrows, more green text. This has helped me stay on track, stay motivated and get pointed in the right direction every single day.

If you’re on a Mac, there is an issue with being able to set a live web page as your screensaver. It’s not something that’s built in. I believe that that is a built in functionality on Windows these days. If you’re on a Mac like I am, you can use a little tool called Web Saver. It’s at code.google.com. Just search for Web Saver, you’ll be able to find it. It will download, then you install it into your system and then it’ll be in your screensaver settings. You can choose Web Saver, enter in the URL that you want to display (which of course is going to be your Geckoboard URL) and boom! It’s set up. It’s pretty simple.

I hope that you enjoy it and I hope that this tip keeps you motivated in your business too. If you’ve got any questions about the set up or something completely different, head on over to MichelleMacPhearson.com and let me know. I’d be happy to answer them in a future episode. Thanks so much, guys!

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