KPI Tracking
When you decide to create a company dashboard to track all your Key Primary Indicators, what you are effectively doing is measuring how effective your business is at achieving its goals and make it easier for management to take the right decisions.
Your KPI reports must be tied to the general strategy your company is adopting, you want to follow only KPIs that matters. If your company is about to start a big marketing campaign or launch a blog, make sure that you will be tracking every relevant data and capturing key analytics indicators before it starts. For example, key performance indicators would be increase in visitor’s traffic, conversion percentage to customer
You also need to take into consideration the maintenance of your indicators, where does the data comes from? Who makes sure they are accurate? Who is in charge of following those indicators? Analyze them?
What is KPI Tracking?
Defining KPI tracking is basically the art of making sure you are following the right metrics the right way.
KPIs generally falls in different categories:
- Business KPI: metrics evaluating factors toward achieving the company goals.
- High level KPI: Company overall performance
- Low Level KPI: focus on smaller goals, often related to performance of a particular business department
Be SMART about your tracking your KPIs!
Specific: Be as specific as possible when deciding on your goals: “increase sales of product X by 10%” rather than a generic “we have to raise the sales level” for a performance tracking KPI.
Measurable: give your metrics concrete objectives for measuring your progress: “We need at attendance of 10 000 persons at this event” and not “we should get as many as possible” for a success tracking KPI.
Attainable: Keep your goals reasonable and adjusted to your overall business objectives, don’t discourage your teams by setting an objective that is unattainable such as “get a quote in every major newspapers” for a PR campaign KPI.
Relevant: Make sure your KPis are relevant to your company overall strategy : Don’t use mass media campaign KPI if you’re only doing web marketing !
Time-bound: Each metrics you are measuring must include a time dimension: “make sure you have clear deadlines for them and avoid “soon” or “asap” as much as possible.
KPI Tracking Software
There is a lot of KPI tracking software on the market, most of them have specific features who defines them for a specific use, or for a specific type of industry.
One of the first question you need to ask yourself is about your data. KPI tracking software may or may not have the possibility to connect to your data source. Most of the new generation BI Tools, such as ClicData software, have a lot of options to gather Data directly from over cloud applications, local database or even simple spreadsheets.
You will also need to take in consideration the price of the solution. Tracking KPIs can be simply done with an Excel spreadsheet, and most small companies relies on it to track their progress, but it does have its limitation. On the opposite side, completely tailored solutions really cost a lot and are often a luxury only big companies can afford. However there is a middle ground where you can find a lot of very interesting solutions under a 100$ per month, and it is not because a solution is cheap that it’s not powerful!
Learn more about KPI with our others guides :
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They Follow Their KPIs With ClicData
