How do you track the success of your online course?

1 Define your success metrics

Before you can measure the success of your online course, you need to determine what success looks like to you. This will depend on your course objectives, target market, and business model. To evaluate your progress, consider metrics such as enrollment rate, completion rate, satisfaction rate, learning outcomes, and revenue. You should set specific and measurable goals for each metric and track them over time to see if you are reaching or surpassing them.

2 Use analytics tools

Analytics tools are a great way to track the success of your online course. Google Analytics is a free, powerful tool that helps you understand traffic, conversions, bounce rate, and user behavior. Teachable is a platform that lets you create and sell courses, and also provides built-in analytics for student progress, quiz scores, feedback, and revenue reports. SurveyMonkey is a tool that lets you create and distribute surveys to your students and analyze the results. You can integrate these tools with your course website and dashboard to monitor and optimize your course performance.

3 Ask for feedback

Gathering feedback from your students is an effective way to track the success of your online course. Feedback offers direct insights into your students' opinions, experiences, and challenges, which can be used to improve your course content, delivery, and support. You can ask for feedback by sending automated or personalized emails after enrollment, completion, or upsell. Alternatively, you can create and send surveys using tools like SurveyMonkey or Typeform. Additionally, you can encourage your students to leave reviews on your course website, social media, or third-party platforms. The feedback you receive can help you measure satisfaction rate, learning outcomes, and revenue metrics. It can also enable you to identify areas of improvement and opportunities for growth.

4 Test and improve

To track the success of your online course, you should test and improve it based on data and feedback. This is an ongoing process that involves making changes to content, marketing, and customer service, and then measuring the effects. For example, you can test and improve content by adding or removing modules or changing the format or delivery of lessons. Or you can test and improve marketing by creating or modifying a course page or changing copy, design, or offer. Additionally, you can test and improve customer service by adding or removing support channels or creating or updating FAQs. By using analytics tools and feedback to compare before and after results of your testing and improvement, you can see if they lead to higher enrollment, completion, satisfaction, learning, and revenue rates. Through tracking success of the online course, you will be able to make informed decisions to enhance quality, relevance, and impact - all of which will be beneficial for both you and your students.

5 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?