What are key metrics?

Key metrics are the tactical initiatives that you and your web team identify for your website. These are the types of visitor actions that help your organization achieve its overall objectives, whether they are lead generation, digital participation, or customer satisfaction. Key business metrics are the numbers you track to make sure your company is doing the best it can. They help companies achieve their objectives and determine where improvement is needed.

Key metrics, also known as key performance indicators (KPIs), are critical to your company's success. Monitoring is the way to measure the performance of your company and obtain information that will help you increase your results. Simply looking at key metrics can give you an idea of an organization that would otherwise require sophisticated analysis of large amounts of data. The problem with this approach is that, without a more formal methodology, a company can lose sight of the factors and results of key metrics.

If you're planning to rank in search engines, you already know that keywords are just as important as SEO metrics. It's also an important starting point for calculating other key metrics, such as net profit margin and earnings per share. It's also important to note that organizations differ in their priorities: what is a key metric for one company is not necessarily a key metric for another. To expand your knowledge of what the key metrics are, let's now consider the different approaches to applying KPIs.

Meanwhile, the chief operating officer of a manufacturing company might want to track the perfect order rate, a key performance indicator (KPI) to measure the performance of warehouse operations. The small comparison KPIs just below make it easy to compare these key metrics with benchmarks, in this case, figures from previous years. In addition to industry-specific key metrics, individual departments of an organization track metrics specific to their management objectives. Tracking business metrics reveals whether the company is performing higher or lower in key industry benchmarks.

Since all of these different key metrics rely on data as their engine, it's important to have a framework that allows you to collect, measure, manage and analyze data. Also known as a key performance indicator, or KPI, a key metric is a statistic that, by its value, gives a measure of the overall health and performance of an organization or department.