Not that I'm suprised or anything...you're not alone.

A week or two ago I wrote two similar blog posts about analytics. BY FAR, these are the most important tools for measuring your business; thus determining strong/weak points and building from there. Not surprisingly, and not that I'm offended, two commented on one and said they do them but didn't offer any details when asked and the other had no comments at all, even though it was featured.

Perhaps because no one really does them, understands them or perhaps are afraid of the results. So let me ask the question a different way:

What percentage of your business this past year was derived from:

Cold Calling
Referrals
Job Boards
ATS use
Social media (FB, Linkedin, etc)
Online (non social media)
Directories and the like
Other

If you can't answer these question with certainty (and this doesn't even take into account the associated ROI for each) you're leaving money on the table!

In a week I'll aggregate the results and ask another question and wallah! you'll have your analytics. I think you will find the results shocking!

Comment by Andrew Hally on December 14, 2011 at 11:23am: Glad to see another analytics acolyte preaching the metrics religion! I look forward to seeing the results. "In-person networking" might deserve to be on your list of business sources. We ask a similar quesiton in our yearly staffing and recruiting trends survey and the top two methods for client acquisition last year were "attend network events" and "join professional organizations." BTW, we just opened the survey for 2012 -please weigh in if you have a few minutes.