All business which hope to even marginally successful will inevitably track certain metrics as a matter of course. All businesses, for example, will keep a clear record of their quarterly earnings, their personnel expenses, and so on and so forth.

Shutterstock licensed photo – By Pressmaster

Not all businesses, however, take things to the next level and adopt a policy of complete measurement and calculation of every potentially relevant metric in the company. Not just in the company as an organizational entity, either, but in the daily routines and behaviors of the individual team members and employees who comprise the company.

Part of this is just an understandable logistical issue. The more things you have to track and optimize, the more micromanagement and personnel required. With the innovations of the digital age, and the assistance of companies such as Cloudstream Partners, however, you may be surprised by how much you can manage without overburdening your staff.

Knowledge is power, as the old saying goes. Here are a few reasons why tracking and analyzing data can transform your business.

We all have blind spots, and tracking data points can help us to shine some light on them

On an individual level, people may well be extremely capable at their jobs, not to mention very insightful, driven, conscientious, and obliging. This would seem to describe the template of the ideal member of staff.

The thing is, no matter how capable we all may be in various dimensions of our professional and personal lives, we nonetheless all have blind spots which we’re unaware of, and which may hamper our ability to perform to the utmost of our potential.

Tracking data points relating to our daily habits, routines, productivity, and so on, can be invaluable in helping us to identify and shine some light on those unseen dimensions, so that we can begin improving on them.

By tracking your time at work via a tool like Rescue Time or Time Doctor, for example, you may discover that during hours of the working day, you’re unproductive due to certain distracting habits.

That which is measured, improves

There’s a well-known business maxim that’s sometimes attributed to the noted statistician Karl Pearson, and sometimes to the management consultant Peter Drucker, which states that “that which is measured, improves.”

Undeniably, there is something to that idea. When you measure something, you also identify areas of insufficiency — places where there’s room for improvement.

From that point on, the natural human drive to repair and optimize flagging systems comes into play, and it certainly it makes it easier for the company as a whole to strategize appropriately.

Tracking analytics can help you identify the 80/20 ratios in your company

The concept of the 80/20 rule, or ratio, suggests that 80 per cent of the favorable results you’ll enjoy in business will come from a core 20 per cent of your actions. The other eighty per cent of your actions are, therefore, largely wasted. Certainly inefficient.

Tracking analytics can help you to identify the manifestations of this 80/20 rule in your company. Maybe through tracking web visitor stats, you’ll notice that certain pages have an almost 100 per cent bounce rate, while others account for almost all of your engagement.

In this way, measuring things studiously can help you to focus your professional energies as efficiently and powerfully as possible.