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🧮 Stay on Track Track Track - Metrics to guide your marketing.

In this week's Baking it Down Podcast - Episode 241 - Stay on Track Track Track, the twins have spreadsheets on the brain just in time for the new year.

While yes, you can start a spreadsheet any time on any day in any month of the year, it does help to have it ready to go on January 1 - that way, you can look at your bakery's entire fiscal year, start to finish.

The key to spreadsheets and data tracking is this: first, determine the goal, then let the goal guide what you track.

If you want to become a social media influencer, you'll focus on content and views. If you want to increase sales, you're going to focus on customer acquisition. If you want to focus on corporate orders, you're going to track business networking event contacts.

That's why there's no "one size fits all" for reporting and record keeping. What your goals are in 2026 =/= the goals of your closest competitor. So stop lookin' over the fence at what they're doing and focus on the reports.

🧮 Increasing Returning Customers

Let's say your focus for the first 3 months of the year (Q1) is to cultivate returning leads. You're going to shift from finding new clients (yes, you can still look for new clients, but it's not our driving metric).

To cultivate returning clients, you may be tracking these types of metrics:

• 🔢 How many past clients did you add to your CRM? 
• 🔢 How many emails have I sent to past clients? What was the open rate? 
• 🔢 How many past clients placed new orders in 2026 YTD? 

🧮 Increasing Corporate Leads

If you want to set a goal of increasing corporate leads, you're not going to naturally do a hard push towards cookie classes, right? That's not the right fit for the goal = corporate girly era.

To increase corporate leads, you must increase corporate exposure, and that's likely through business-centric networking events and apps like LinkedIn. You're likely going to create a segmented email list for corporate contacts.

To cultivate corporate orders, you may be tracking these types of metrics:

• 🔢 How many networking events have you attended?
• 🔢 From those events, how many contacts did you add on LinkedIn?
• 🔢 From those LinkedIn contacts, how many did you drop off a "pop-by" to?

🧮 Increase Order Totals

If you're looking to increase the total ticket sale (the amount you make per order), you're going to focus on tracking your price increase, your production costs, and your upsells.

To increase order totals, you may be tracking these types of metrics:

• 🔢 How many clients added an upsell to their order?
• 🔢 By what percentage did I increase my custom orders?
• 🔢 What was my order ticket average in 2025? What is my order ticket average in 2026?

Yes, you can run concurrent goals, you can run campaigns for various durations, and you can absolutely abandon a goal if you determine it hasn't been fitting your overall strategy. Knowing when to cut a goal off can be just as valuable as knowing when to double down.

When determining which metrics to track, ask yourself:

• 🧮 What is my primary goal?
• 🧮 And if that's my primary goal, what metrics support being able to track and determine if that goal is being met, missed, or in progress?

👂 Snag this podcast on any major podcast player (Spotify, Apple Music, Audible, Amazon Music, or watch it on YouTube) by searching for Baking it Down Podcast - Episode 241 - Stay on Track Track Track.