Your KPIs (key performance indicators) are meant to help you understand the health of your business and the impact of your marketing—and when you do, you can make even smarter decisions because you have the data.
There are two schools of thought when it comes to choosing which KPIs to track. The first is what you might call the "vanity metric" school—these are the metrics that make you feel good but don't do a great job of giving you meaningful information about your business. For example, your total number of social media followers would be considered a vanity metric because the number of followers usually doesn't have a direct impact on the size of your business.
The second school of thought would be the "actionable metric" school—these are the metrics that give you insights into what's working and what isn't so you can make changes accordingly. An example of an actionable metric would be your website's bounce rate (the percentage of people who leave your site after only viewing one page).
Which types of KPIs should you pick as ones to track for your small business? The answer is both! While it's important to focus on metrics that will give you actionable insights, it's also good to track vanity metrics so you can see your progress over time (especially because these help you understand how your brand is growing). For example, if you're trying to grow your social media following, tracking your monthly growth is a good way to see if your efforts are paying off. But if you want to know what marketing channel is your best one, track something like the number of new clients or customers you get by marketing channel.
When you create your marketing strategy, one of the things Enji does is recommend some KPIs for you to track (you’ll see empty charts when you click into the Performance tab). You might like them all or feel like only a few work—you can delete any charts you don’t want by right clicking on them.
When it comes to figuring out what additional KPIs you want to track and what charts to create, there are a few things to keep in mind:
You should pick KPIs that help you understand if you are making progress towards your goals. So refer to your marketing strategy and look at the goals and objectives you have—what metrics can you track to know whether you’re making progress (an example is below)
If you are a service-based business and want to know what marketing channel is your best, you should track where your leads are coming from by source
Example KPIs for the “Do a better job with SEO” goal and “Get found on the internet” objective pairing:
Website visitors
New website visitors organic search
Page views
Most visited website page