46 Indicators You Can (and should) Measure
“Ok, I get it. I need to measure stuff, but what stuff?” this is a question I receive almost every day. Getting inspired by Stephen Few’s book Information Dashboard Design, I put together a list of typical business metrics you can measure. It is up to you to figure out what the most important indicators for your specific business are, but I am hoping to spark up some ideas here. Pick just few of the indicators for the start, start measuring them on a regular basis and share them across your organization, you can always add more later.
What do you measure? What did I miss? Let me know!
Sales
Bookings
Billings
Number of orders
Selling prices
Sales qualified leads
Marketing
Marketing funnel: Inquires -> Marketing qualified leads -> Sales qualified leads -> Opportunity Pipeline
Campaign success
Customer demographics
% Revenue sourced by marketing
% Revenue influenced by marketing
Outbound emails sent
Referrals
Social media mentions
Finance
Revenues
Expenses
Profits
Operating margin
Cash Flow
Technical Support
Number of support calls
Resolved Cases
Customer satisfaction
Call durations
Average waiting time
Fulfillment
Number of days to ship
Backlog
Inventory levels
Return rates
Manufacturing
Number of units manufactured
Manufacturing times
Number of defects
Human resources
Employee satisfaction
Employee turnover
Count of open positions
Count of late performance reviews
Information Technology
Network downtime
System Usage
Fixed application bugs
Web Services
Number of visitors
Click through rate
Conversion rate (e.g. number of product registrations)
Number of Pageviews
Average time per visit
Bounce rate
Product (online)
Product usage
Time since last login
Account Cancellations
Photo credit flowerchild60
3 Comments have been made so far
Hubert,
Thanks for this valuable post. If you and your readers are interested in KPI templates, then http://kpilibrary.com , a free community that focusses entirely on measurements, KPIs and metrics could interest you. With over 4000 KPI templates to choose from, business performance management professionals use this valuable resource quite a lot. There are over 175.000 registered members. Membership is free.
Karel,
Thanks for the tip. It seems like an interesting database you guys put together!
Cheers,
Hubert
What stuff to measure?
There is standard named GB935 “Business Benchmarking Metrics Framework” (ver. 4.4), developed under the aegis of TeleManagement Forum (http://www.tmforum.org).
There are 80 metrics in all described in table with 3 horizontal and 5 vertical categories. The “horizontal” categories are:
- revenue and margin (Margin/Revenue, OpEx/CapEx, OpEx/Revenue)
- customer experience
- operational efficience
The “vertical” ones are:
- general
- customer management
- fulfillment
- assurance
- billing
Of course all these metrics have been developed and described in the first place for telco business. But it is clearly that a lot of them can be applied to any kind of business.