At the end of each month, and particularly at year end and mid year, it is interesting to study your own results and the trends in the data. New instructors might find this particularly helpful. Note that our data is largely dependent on the trends for our category. Mine is Management/Leadership courses which is probably trending differently than courses on Photoshop, game development, or coding. They are each very different markets and how much marketing muscle Udemy puts behind a particular category will make a big difference to our results.
I plot course enrollments by month/course. This isn't exactly the same as revenue, but there is a close correlation. I do this because 40% of my revenue is from UFB and we don't know that data until a week into the next month. Enrollments gives me a day-by-day result that I can see.
So, here is a two year chart of my enrollments. The different colors are different courses. You can see the overall positive trend. You can see the obvious big months of November and January. Year over year, this month was an 80% increase over one year ago. I attribute this almost entirely to Udemy's marketing efforts. I have only one new course during this year and it is doing just OK. This past year I have been pretty lazy about marketing (blog posts, etc.) and I really need to pick up my own efforts in coming months.
I love to look for trends. The macro trend is obvious from looking at the straight line from July two years ago to today. But also interesting is that last year May, June and July were a downward trend. This year they are an upward trend. August of last year was up from July, so I hope August will again be up which will create a four month very positive trend.
How were your results and what are you learning by studying your own data and trends?
