A couple of weeks ago I did a blog post titled ‘Why Accountants Make GREAT Entrepreneurs‘. The theme of the post was outlining how a numbers focus approached is necessary with entrepreneurship. Mike, one of my blog readers suggested I share how I track my numbers and point to any spreadsheets templates that I use. I thought it was a great idea and today I wanted to do just that!
[Download All 3 SpreadSheets Here]
I have a few spreadsheets I use to track all the necessary data I need to ensure I know where I stand at any given point. I’ll go through the main ones,
Note 1: There’s probably a way better way to do this but I’m old school and stubborn :p
Note 2: All numbers and traffic sources are made up.
Teespring Spreadsheet
Above is a sample of what my Teespring tracking spreadsheet would look like at any given time. I’ve highlighted the main parts and will refer to them as ‘boxes’.
Box 1: Profit I make per Tee/Hoodie
Box 2: This is the design column. I segment these into design types, e.g, ‘Guy Dog Shirts’, ‘Hockey Hoodies’, ‘Name Shirts’, etc, so I can keep track of what type of designs are doing well.
Box 3: This box is the total number of shirts sold for that particular day. For example, if on the 25th, I go to my Staffy campaign and it says ‘7 shirts sold’, the number in this column will also be 7. This column is the only column I update regularly. as Box 4 & 5 will auto update itself when ‘T’ is filled out.
Box 4: This box is,
(Total # of shirts sale count today) – (Total # of shirt sale count yesterday)
This will calculate how many shirts sold for that particular day
Box 5: This one is pretty simple. It’s (The number of shirts sold today) x (profit per tee). Basically, box 1 x box 4.
Box 6: Having the spreadsheet set up in this way, with all the necessary figures laid out in front of me, I can take an overview look at my campaigns. Campaign Larry has sold 0, consecutively for 3 days. I would pause this.
Box 7: Campaign Barry is a little more interesting. It sold 2 on the first day but hasn’t sold any more in the next 2 days. I would probably cancel this at this point or I’ll tweak the ad and give it another $10 spend.
Box 8: The Grandpa Campaign for Hockey Hoodies is doing exceptionally well. It’s sold more than 10 in two consecutive days. I’d increase the budget here and monitor how the next few days pan out.
box 9: This column calculates the total revenue coming in from my teespring business for each day. I’ll take these figures and plug it into my next spreadsheet which is..
Main Spreadsheet
Now this beast keeps track of how much money I’m spending on my traffic sources and how much revenue I’m bringing in from my networks. You can probably figure out what everything means so I don’t think it’s necessary for me to explain each section.
The main reason for this spreadsheet is to keep an eye on WHERE I’m spending my money and how it’s having an effect on my overall revenue.
I used to have an even more detailed spreadsheet going through how much I was spending for each offer but then it started to consume way too much time. This is as much as I manually drill down, (apart from the usual prosper tracking).
My last spreadsheet is my Profit/Loss spreadsheet,
Profit/Loss Spreadsheet
This one is what goes into my monthly reports. It gives me the main info I need for the day, that is, did I make money or not. At the end of the day this spreadsheet is what affiliate marketing comes down to. After all the designing, researching, tracking, facebook group chats, networking, etc it all comes down to How much did you make.
I look at this spreadsheet almost every day. If the numbers drop too low, then I investigate why this has happened by going to the more intricate ‘Main Spreadsheet’.
These are all the spreadsheets I use for my Affiliate Marketing business. Everyone will have a different system but at the end of the day it’s what works for you. Obviously the more data the better. The more you can drill down to your analytics’ and learn more about how and why your results are what they are, the better chance you have of improving them.
Here’s a video on how you can use these spreadsheets
~ Mateen
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Hey Mateen,very interesting updates!
Nice article. I need to get more motivated to get the accounting and tracking to the level it needs to be. Thanks for motivating me.
Dan Stojadinovic
Thanks for sharing this man, creating P+L spreadsheets is one of my least favorite things to do so this will come in handy. Any chance you can put this on Drive and share it?
I’ve added a download link, let me know if there’s any issues! I also did a video on how to tweak it so check that out too.
Hey Mateen,
Thanks alot for the this. I was just about to work on my tracking during this weekend.
This is indeed what i wanted to track my PPV campaigns. Thanks alot once again.
No probs! How’s that for timing 😉
Will these templates work for Google docs and open office?
Hey Tommie,
I actually created them in Openoffice, (saved them in xls for excel). They should work with Openoffice though. Should also be able to copy paste, (with formulas), to google docs.
Thanks.
Wow Thanks for this info Mateen! it will help me improve my campaigns!
Very interesting “multi-level” approach to tracking, that way only when key numbers pop, then you drill-down to specific data.. I’ll definitely start tweaking my tracking to reflect this tips… Thanks again Mateen!