When I was in high school and college, I wrote a list of every movie I went to, where I saw it, and with whom.
Every day, I used to write in my planner one or two sentences anything interesting that had happened that day, so I had a pretty accurate record of my life events, like when we went on our annual Six Flags Great America trip or when I asked my crush to the Kings Daughters dance…and he said YES!
I guess what I’m saying is that I like to keep track of things.
Now, do these things really matter now? Nope.
But there are other things that DO matter that we could be tracking. And as science has shown that our memories are fallible, tracking certain data points just makes sense.
There’s a reason that stores have a restroom log, to keep track of when those toilets were last sanitized for the public’s benefit.
You might think that you last scrubbed the tub a week ago, but if you had actually kept a record of it, you’d see it was really November 17th (ew). Or you might swear that milk has only been in the fridge for two weeks, but you open it to find it’s now basically yogurt.
Similarly, you might FEEL LIKE you did a TON of auditions this week. But your feeling…isn’t fact.
I’m not going to try to quote this, since there’s a lot of conflicting information about who really said this, how they said it, and if they were really saying what people thought they were saying, but…
If you can measure it, you can manage it.
Your time is more valuable than mine was at age 15, so, no, you don’t need to track everything. But actionable data is worth tracking so you have something to aim for!
First, an anecdote.
One day, a fellow voice actor friend of mine was lamenting over Voice123 and whether or not it was worth it. This friend’s opinion was that it wasn’t worth the investment they’d made, and they were also certain that they’d done tons better on Voices.
Now, everyone is different, but if you know some key numbers, you can do some quick math and determine if the investment is worth it.
Here are some numbers I coaxed out of my anonymous chum:
Voice123 Annual Stats:
Annual Subscription $2200 (There are many tiers, and this is the second highest)
Auditions submitted 170
Total bookings 3
Gross income $2600
Booking ratio: 1 in 56.6
Voices Annual Stats:
Annual Subscription $400
Auditions submitted 379
Total bookings 3
Gross income $1557
Booking ratio: 1 in 126.3
Looking at these stats, I can why my friend might believe Voices is the better bet: they paid $400 for a subscription that earned $1,557 (nearly 4x return), while V123 cost $2,200 for $2,600 in earnings (barely breaking even).
However, the booking efficiency tells a different story: on V123, they booked 1 job per 57 auditions, versus 1 job per 126 auditions on Voices. This suggests that V123 auditions are more likely to convert to actual jobs. That pay…you know…money.
(Plus, I didn’t even get into the 20% commission that Voices takes on top of the job…that’s a whole other level of math I don’t want to do.)
Perception is flawed. Our feelings about the measurement of things aren’t accurate.
The real issue here is the disconnect between the feeling (“I feel like I’m auditioning a lot”) and the actual number of auditions submitted. 549 auditions over 12 months, averages out to just 1.5 auditions a day.
Does that sound like a lot?
For comparison, in the same 12 month period, I did 2300 auditions on V123 alone—more than 10 times the number of auditions my friend had submitted on that platform. The result was that I also made 10 times the income they did.
This perfectly illustrates why tracking your data is crucial: our perception rarely matches reality, and without concrete numbers, we can't make informed decisions about where to focus our efforts.
After doing the math, I told my friend:
“You need to audition more. And you need to track how many auditions you’re doing, because your perception of how much time you’re spending auditioning is inaccurate.”
What are your auditions worth?
Something I learned from Jenna Pinchbeck (thanks for this, Jenna!) was to take your total income from each source, divide it by the number of auditions you've done from that source, and then you'll know how much each audition you do is worth to you.
Mind you, this calculation requires a sufficiently large sample size—the more data, the more reliable your estimate. (For my calculations, if a client from V123 comes back to me in the same year, I count it towards that income amount, because without the audition, I wouldn’t have earned it)
Knowing that each audition you do is worth a certain dollar amount can help you feel motivated to get in the booth and do more auditions on days when you don’t really feel like it. If I know that I can submit 10 auditions an hour, and each audition is worth $12, then every time I go into the booth and do those 10 auditions in an hour, I’m making $120/hour. Then I can break it down to how many auditions I need to do to make what I want to make in new income (this is obviously not accounting for recurring clients).
How do I track all of this?
I used to use an elaborate system of nested folders on my computer and tally everything in a good ol’ fashioned spreadsheet.
But then, I discovered Voiceoverview.
(I’m totally not being paid for this, I promise.)
Voiceoverview allows me to track my auditions, my jobs, expenses…basically everything that a voice actor might need to track, in ONE place. I’ve been using it for about a year and a half now. It’s not a robust CRM for heavy duty cold email marketing, but it’s got great funtionality. It integrates with Wave, so I can create client invoices right from the site, set reminders to contact people, get reports (quarterly taxes, anyone???) And Dani States, who created it, holds frequent office hours to answer your questions about anything that you have trouble figuring out. I LOVE it.
Here’s a link to more info about the site in case you’d like to check it out for yourself: https://voiceoverview.com/tutorials/
Here’s my biggest lesson for you in all of this:
We can only control the effort we put in every day.
We cannot control the outcome.
If we inaccurately judge the amount of effort we expend on our careers, it’s no wonder we feel stuck, disempowered, and confused about why the results aren’t coming.
Why do that to yourself? Measure it so you can manage it!
Do you track data in your voiceover career? Why or why not?