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Marketing Measures That Matter

Author's avatar By Dave Chaffey 07 Dec, 2016
Essential Essential topic

Chart of the Day: An example of the 'Critical few' KPIs

To coincide with the release of an enhancement to our RACE digital marketing dashboard, today's Chart of the Day isn't published research around digital marketing. Instead, it's what I think is a nice, practical example of achieving focus through a marketing dashboard:

An example of the measures / KPIs that matterThe visual dashboard above is a well-known dashboard example, taken from the well-regarded source of sharing approaches to managing Digital Business - the UK government's digital service.

Their article explains that when they're building a digital-by-default service like Carer’s Allowance, their team is continuously designing, testing and releasing changes to the live service to improve it and better meet user needs against critical KPIs of which standard usability measures like completion rate, user satisfaction and time to complete are most important.

They explain that, as a team, testing innovation they're moving away from detailed analytics reports to performance dashboards:

"Analytics reports have their place but they don’t help agile product teams make informed decisions while moving fast. We prioritise and release changes every 2 weeks and need to know quickly how the latest changes are performing.

Key metrics are data points that change over time depending on how well the service is meeting user needs. They relate directly to how easy, quick, or understandable the transaction is for users".

That's an approach to measurement and improvement which applies equally to commercial businesses and it certainly informs our approach to testing and use of dashboards for weekly and monthly reporting and review. In our main member's dashboard for Google Analytics  we have selected just 4 measures for each part of the RACE funnel from the many, many measures available in Google Analytics and channel measures for each are shown in a drill-down.

Author's avatar

By Dave Chaffey

Digital strategist Dr Dave Chaffey is co-founder and Content Director of online marketing training platform and publisher Smart Insights. 'Dr Dave' is known for his strategic, but practical, data-driven advice. He has trained and consulted with many business of all sizes in most sectors. These include large international B2B and B2C brands including 3M, BP, Barclaycard, Dell, Confused.com, HSBC, Mercedes-Benz, Microsoft, M&G Investment, Rentokil Initial, O2, Royal Canin (Mars Group) plus many smaller businesses. Dave is editor of the templates, guides and courses in our digital marketing resource library used by our Business members to plan, manage and optimize their marketing. Free members can access our free sample templates here. Dave is also keynote speaker, trainer and consultant who is author of 5 bestselling books on digital marketing including Digital Marketing Excellence and Digital Marketing: Strategy, Implementation and Practice. In 2004 he was recognised by the Chartered Institute of Marketing as one of 50 marketing ‘gurus’ worldwide who have helped shape the future of marketing. My personal site, DaveChaffey.com, lists my latest Digital marketing and E-commerce books and support materials including a digital marketing glossary. Please connect on LinkedIn to receive updates or ask me a question.

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Marketing Dashboards

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