Do This at LEAST Every Two Weeks

Chances are, you want to make as much money as you can while putting in the least amount of effort possible. This is the ultimate goal of the dropshipping business lifestyle. It’s 100% possible if you know how to work efficiently—and how to avoid wasting your time doing ‘busy work’. Enter your text here...

As a dropshipper, find ways to implement systems that will help you avoid spending your days doing tasks that eat up your time unnecessarily. It’s easy to fall into the trap of wasting hours on things that do not require doing every day or done faster with a little planning.

This article will teach you how to avoid wasting your time on busy work, and how to set up your business for maximum returns (with minimal effort):

Advertising Audits 

Auditing your advertising campaigns is an essential part of the dropshipping business. Most dropshippers have multiple advertising avenues (blogs, Google, Bing, Facebook, etc.). Going through them all everyday would be too time-intensive. However, if you don’t conduct systemic audits, things can easily go wrong and errors can slip through the cracks without you even noticing. 

This means it’s crucial to have a routine system in place for managing advertising audits. Checking all of your advertising campaigns once every two weeks works well. It will allow you to catch any mistakes without too much time passing—while still pulling you out of the trap of spending an hour on it every single day. 

Unfortunately, sometimes your ads will randomly get turned off by platforms like Facebook. If you’re auditing your campaigns every two weeks, you’ll be able to turn them back on before significant damage to your business occurs. 

Don’t get fooled into thinking that you’d notice if something was amiss. Oftentimes something will be wrong with your ads and there won’t be a glaring red flag to alert you until significant sales have been lost.

Scheduling these audits every two weeks is much more efficient than just periodically checking in every few days. The key is that you need to be consistent and diligent with your schedule. 

Once you’ve established your routine, here are the main things you should be doing as you conduct your audits:

Essentially, you want to do a deep dive into the numbers to see what’s working for your business (as well as what isn’t working). For example, you're accustomed to getting a 10x return on ad spend. Then, when you check it in two weeks and see it’s gone down to 5x, it’s a good indication that something needs adjustment.

Cost per click increasing or a change in the site’s conversion rate might cause a drop in your return. More than likely, you’ll find that you only need to make minor adjustments to fix any issues. However, if you do find something major, the subsequent hours you’ll have to spend putting out the fire will be well worth it.

Traffic Audits

The next thing you need to carve out dedicated time for is traffic audits. When you dive into your Google Analytics data, you should be looking for overall trends. You need to see if your traffic is increasing, decreasing, or holding steady. If you notice any significant changes, it’s crucial to get to the bottom of what’s causing the fluctuations.

If you notice that your traffic suddenly shoots up by 30%, you need to uncover the source of this increase. Identifying if your traffic was generated organically, through paid ads, via Facebook, etc., will help you keep your business moving in the right direction. The same principle applies if you see a drop in traffic. Understanding the root cause will mean you make changes as needed, as well as prevent the same thing from happening in the future.

Another key thing to evaluate as you conduct your traffic audit is your site’s bounce rate. For example, you might notice that your traffic is consistent, but suddenly your bounce rate is cut in half. A bug in your code or other technical errors might cause this. As long as you catch these issues, you can deal with them accordingly before they wreak major havoc on your business.

Customer Service and Conversion Audits 

Monitoring your customer service metrics on a bi-weekly basis can also be helpful depending on the size and scale of your business. You should monitor the numbers of your:

For these metrics, it’s important to take a holistic approach since they can vary. Depending on if you’re doing all the customer service yourself, or if you have people helping you.

You should monitor conversion rates just like your traffic and advertising metrics. The goal should be to identify patterns, catch errors, and stop problems before they start.

Use Your Time Wisely

The most important thing to realize is that the tasks above don’t need to get done every day. By conducting audits on a dedicated two-week basis, you’ll save yourself hours of busy work. Even more crucial is the fact that by allocating time to handle the work above, you’ll be able to use the rest of your time to focus on other aspects of your business. 

Of course, if a major red flag pops up in between audits, you can address it as needed. However, most of the time you won’t be in crisis mode, and a two-week schedule is a great way to manage your time.

One of the best parts of the dropshipping lifestyle is that you don’t have to spend endless hours on your business. By following the tips above, you’ll be on your way to working smarter, not harder.