How’s business? It’s a question small business owners are asked a lot. But it’s one that is increasingly difficult to answer because of the complexities of running a modern business. WebControlRoom.com is a free tool that has been developed to help small businesses answer this question by providing a real time performance report with data from various sources in the one place.
In order to thrive, small business owners need to keep their eye on many different measures to know not only if they are on track now but whether things are heading in the right direction for the future.
Because of the myriad of different services used by small business owners these days, particularly web savvy ones, it’s not easy to get an overall picture of how things are tracking without logging into a lot of different places and manually piecing together the puzzle.
After battling with this issue himself, Australian small business web expert Dan Norris developed a free tool, WebControlRoom.com to do exactly that. By talking to popular small business services like Xero, Mail Chimp, Google Analytics etc, WebControlRoom.com is able to present a one page chart showing the key stats all in the one place giving business owners the important information in seconds.
But unlike other dashboard type services, WebControlRoom.com is not just about pretty charts, Dan explains. “Big companies love pretty charts. But small business wants the right information, quickly. By focusing in on month by month comparison data, the tool makes it clear which areas of your business are going well and which ones need attention”.
“Small business owners can open their report each day from their computer or their mobiles and within a few seconds identify issues or see areas that are performing well”.
Examples of the charts include current Google rankings so business owners can stay in top of how their site ranks for their chosen keywords and newsletter opens from Mail Chimp or Klout score to measure the engagement of their audience. Revenue charts from Xero show how this month’s revenue compares to last month and color and size coding on all charts makes is quick to pinpoint problem areas or see spikes in results.
In total there are 9 services and many more on the way and there is a slim lined version for mobiles that loads whenever the service is accessed from a mobile.
Other than supporting more services, plans for the future include a smart messaging system that provides users with sponsored improvement messages related to their performance.
WebControlRoom.com is available for free to the public as a beta release now.
