Most things you are measuring in marketing can be thought of as an Amount or Flow that should be coupled with a Quality measure.
Most companies seem to have the same problem… an endless sea of reports and nearly as many Dashboards and Key Performance Indicators (KPI). These are all symptoms of a lack of understanding, focus, or agreement on an analytics framework. Let step back to get some perspective and get back to basics.
Basics
When thinking about reporting and monitoring indicators, there are 2 types of reports:
- Forward Looking (Leading Indicators) — these are used to measure performance of the current cycle (i.e. quarter) using measures that are proxies for your goal to see if we are on track on need a course correction.
- Backward Looking (Lagging Indicators) — these are used to look back at the past cycle to verify performance and measuring the goal directly to see if we hit our target.
Types of Measures
Most thing you are measuring about your business and funnel can be thought of an amount (views, reach, etc) or flow of something (i.e. responses/day, leads/week, deals/quarter, etc). When building Forward looking reports, I find it helps to think of the measures as a Amount / Flow, which should be paired with a Quality measure. The Amount / Flow are items that we within your direct control. Quality should be something that is just outside you process and serves to validate the Quality of the output from your team. Backward Looking reports are simpler and typically an Amount (goal) and Quality measure here is often a distribution of sorts.
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