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You're driving. You need to know what speed you're traveling at, how many miles you've traveled, how much gas remains in the tank, and what temperature your engine is.

Now imagine how much it'd slow you down to go to four separate places to get that information. You'd have to stop and restart your journey each time you check one of those numbers.

Sounds ridiculous, right? That's why your car's equipped with a dashboard, and why automakers keep updating dashboards to make them into more powerful tools that deliver more information at a glance.

This concludes our metaphor.

Now, let's get to the point: Marketers need dashboards, too; else they burn time in pursuit of the numbers they need. And that's no way to optimize your mileage (well hello again, metaphor).

Seriously, though, serious digital marketers are masters of measurement:

  1. The good ones simplify decision-making processes by examining marketing metrics.
  2. The better ones simplify the examination process by establishing a manageable set of key performance indicators (KPIs) to review regularly.
  3. The best ones simplify their KPI review process by consolidating their analytics sources in one place.

Seeing as how I've been doing digital marketing since it got its start, I feel qualified to make up my own terms now and then. So I ask you to indulge me as I present...

KPIQ: the degree of intelligence you bring to your marketing performance and measurement.

Let's work toward raising your KPIQ in three steps.

1. Establish your KPIs

You can have a KPIQ only if you have KPIs, so you need to consider which performance indicators are key to your business. Jay Baer puts content marketing metrics into four primary buckets:

  1. Consumption: The most fundamental type of content metric, consumption can be measured as pageviews or downloads.
  2. Sharing: All of the various social channels offer sharing-related metrics (such as tweets and likes).
  3. Lead generation: This metric will generally come from form fills, which might be measured with your marketing platform or by Google Analytics (where thank-you pages indicate a lead was generated).
  4. Sales: Measurement of sales will require integrating your marketing automation platform and CRM or e-commerce system.

HubSpot points out that the less you know about your key performance indicators, the less likely you are to meet your revenue goals. Its research shows seven metrics marketers commonly use to measure content marketing success:

  1. Traffic
  2. Sales
  3. Conversion
  4. SEO rank
  5. Time on site
  6. Customer feedback
  7. Subscriber growth

Metrics commonly used for marketing success

Here's another way you could consider organizing metrics by category and KPIs, suggested by PracticalEcommerce:

KPIs by metrics category chart

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How to Raise Your KPIQ: Key Performance Indicators and Your Marketing IQ

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

image of Barry Feldman

Barry Feldman is the author of SEO Simplified for Short Attention Spans. Barry operates Feldman Creative and provides content marketing consulting, copywriting, and creative direction services. He contributes to top marketing sites and was named one of 25 Social Media Marketing Experts You Need to Know by LinkedIn. To get a piece of his mind, visit his blog, The Point.

Twitter: @FeldmanCreative

LinkedIn: Barry Feldman