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Founded in 2008. The Landscape Juice Network (LJN) is the largest and fastest growing professional landscaping and horticultural association in the United Kingdom.

LJN's professional business forum is unrivalled and open to anyone within within the UK landscape industry

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For the researching visitor there's a wealth of landscaping ideas, garden design ideas, lawn advice tips and advice about garden maintenance.

PRO

Do you use charts in your business?

I thought I'd share LJN's Google Analytics chart to demonstrate how one may summarise performance at a glance. In an instant I'm able to make some important observations.

The most obvious observation is that LJN's traffic has continued to grow year-on-year since the Google Analytics code was added in mid-2009.

Other points to note;

LJN's traffic peaks at the beginning of May (green circle). However the last two years has shown a significant spike, which suggests that landscaping and gardening activity increased compared to the previous two years. Perhaps when the recession was still holding things back?

The orange circles highlight the slowest day of the year. Yes, you guessed it....Christmas Day. However - and this is most interesting - LJN received 498 visits on Christmas Day 2013, of which 51% were returning visitors. The rest (49%) could be made up of some returning visitors but because some people choose not to have their activity tracked, these visitors are lumped into the new visitor category.

I can also tell that, traditionally, the second half of the year sees LJN's traffic slow (bottoming on Christmas day) but rising again rapidly from January onwards.

A couple of extra observations. The two blips (red arrow) tell me that We had a one day surge of traffic on 25th July 2010 (reason unknown)and no visitors on 16th October 2013 when I know that our Host, Ning, was down.

Using a chart for everything

In my life business I've always charted things. Whether that's new enquires to help me understand the time of year I'm likely to get the most leads.

Because is visual it's so much easier to instantly understand cycles, history, demand (or lack of it). Cashflower against outgoings is a particularly good way of seeing (or predicting) when cash will be most scarce but when costs are at their highest. The resulting divergence is easily recognised when plotted onto a chart.

You don't need to use spreadsheets. A quick drawing using the known numbers can be knocked up in a matter of minutes.

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  • PRO

    This is a graph of LJN's activity through yesterday.

    In an instant I can get an idea of where our busiest times are.

    3314740835?profile=original

  • PRO
    FYI 22 (10pm) is actually 9pm GMT.



    Phil Voice said:

    This is a graph of LJN's activity through yesterday.

    In an instant I can get an idea of where our busiest times are.

    3314740835?profile=original

  • Interesting Phil going to put this into practise , will help a lot with staffing etc. if your not geared up for the rush, you lose business having to turn potential clients away.
  • Excellent article, Phil, succinct and well presented.

    You don't need to use spreadsheets. A quick drawing using the known numbers can be knocked up in a matter of minutes.
    Very true but if you have the data already entered into a spreadsheet or database within most systems you can get the graphical representation out with a few keystrokes and, with a bit of practice, vary the timescale or use varying emphases to suit your purpose.
  • I've started using quickbooks cloud software and it has loads of charts available.

    My favourites are pie charts..

    Imo my business cant have enough diagrams ;)
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