If you don’t measure something, you can’t improve it. Luckily, metrics can help. They show business owners how their business is performing, developers how customers are using their software, and marketers if their messaging reaches its intended audience. Sounds great, right?
Not so fast!
You see, measuring and tracking all these metrics takes time and effort. That’s why automation has become critical. Automation allows you to get valuable insights faster, so you unlock the ability to make data-driven decisions in less time than ever before, but it’s not without its challenges.
In this post, we’ll show you how to monitor key metrics automatically (and without a headache) with a real example of how Catallaxy, a blockchain consulting firm, does it.
The Simplest Way to Monitor Your Metrics
The simplest way to track and monitor vital metrics automatically is by using the built-in capabilities provided by the tools you use. For example, HubSpot’s CRM tool allows you to create custom dashboards and reports and track the metrics that are most important to you. You can then send these reports directly to your inbox for constant updates.
Unfortunately, this often leads to missing the forest for the trees. In the sea of information, it’s hard to find the data that really matters. Additionally, if you use multiple tools or gather data from various sources, you’ll need a central HQ: the one place where all your different data meets to show you the bigger picture.
A More Complex Way to Monitor Your Metrics: Analytics Tools
Moving up in complexity, you can also use analytics tools to monitor and track your key metrics automatically. This will be the case when your tools don’t have this ability baked in or when they do, but you’re looking for more in-depth insights. You’ll then export your data to these tools, and, in many cases, they offer native integrations.
Either way, these analytics tools like Google Analytics, Google Data Studio, Tableau, Kissmetrics, and many others offer extensive data analysis capabilities that allow you to track almost any metric you can think of.
You can use these capabilities to create custom reports and dashboards automatically and have them delivered directly to your inbox. In this way, you’ll get real-time insights based on your chosen metrics and always stay on top of what’s most important.
It goes further than this, though. Most of these tools also allow you to set up custom alerts when a chosen metric increases above or falls below a specified parameter.
For example, a developer might create an alert to receive a notification when an application resource usage increases above a certain level. Or, a marketer might set up an alert that will alert them if an email campaign’s bounce rate goes beyond a specified percentage.
Another Step Up in Monitoring Complexity: Automation Tools
Yet another step up in complexity is automation tools. These tools, like Zapier, IFTTT, Integrately, and more, integrate with many other tools and platforms and allow you to automate data entry, report generation, and tracking and monitoring.
Ultimately, these tools allow you to create unique workflows based on your individual requirements and the tools and platforms you already use. For example, you might set up Zapier to gather metrics from Churnkey and then send them to a Slack channel weekly.
The Challenge with Monitoring Automation
While these methods can help you monitor and track your metrics automatically, you’ve probably guessed there is a problem – you likely don’t only use one tool or platform.
For example, many marketers use between 5 and 10 tools as part of their marketing technology stack. Likewise, based on a 2021 study, most departments within a business use between 40 and 60 applications.
This means you’ll gather data from different sources. It also means that you’ll likely track and monitor your metrics in different places. While doing this from only one or two platforms can be reasonably simple, the complexity increases exponentially as the number of tools increases.
If only you could have a way to gather and track all these metrics in one place!
The Solution
Luckily, there is a way. You can give ScreenshotAPI a shot.
ScreenshotAPI is a web-based tool that lets you capture screenshots of web pages on autopilot. With the tool, you can take screenshots of websites in various resolutions, file formats, and device types. And because ScreenshotAPI allows you to take screenshots programmatically, you can incorporate it into scripts that take screenshots of every platform you use and every metric you’d like to track.
Then, place them into your central data HQ.
Gather screenshots of every website you use and the metrics they show in one place. From there, analyze them to track important business metrics.
You can go even further. For instance, you can extract the text from screenshots with ScreenshotAPI or the metrics you need and compile them in one place. You can also distribute these screenshots among your team quickly and easily.
This is exactly what Catallaxy does. Hiroaki Ohishi, a representative at the company, says that, since using ScreenshotAPI, he can share metrics of their service with the entire team through Slack effortlessly.
This makes it easier to monitor your metrics and track how they change over time. And the ability to have all these metrics in one place gives you the big picture you need to make wiser decisions.
The only thing to do now is to get started with ScreenshotAPI. If you’re ready to supercharge your monitoring and reporting, start your free trial today!