Content KPIs

What content KPIs are

Content KPIs are the small set of measures — three or four, almost never more — that a business agrees in advance to judge its published work by. Choosing them is a job in its own right. Each measure gets a written definition, a named source it is collected from, one person who owns it, and a baseline recorded on the day it is agreed.

It is not the monthly report. The report is the document that states the numbers each month and says what to do about them, and that is content reporting. It is not the cost-against-return sum either; that is a content ROI analysis, and it happens once a year at most. Choosing the measures comes before both, and takes a few days rather than a few months.

When you need them

Three situations. You are about to start publishing seriously and want the goalposts fixed before anyone has a reason to move them. You have been publishing for a year and the only figure anyone quotes is traffic. Or two people in the business disagree about whether the content is working, because each is looking at a different number and neither number was ever agreed.

You do not need this if you already have three or four measures everyone accepts and simply want them written up each month. Go straight to reporting. You also do not need it if nothing is being published yet and there is no plan; settle the plan first with a content strategy plan, because measures chosen without one tend to measure the wrong thing.

What gets chosen

The shortlist is drawn from four kinds of measure. A set of three or four almost always takes one from each of the first three.

• Something that reaches the business. Qualified inquiries, quote requests, bookings, applications, trial signups. One number a bank manager would accept as evidence that the phone rang.
• A quality measure, not a count. Twenty poor inquiries are a worse month than eight good ones, and a count on its own reports the opposite. Quality is scored simply, on arrival, against two or three things you decide together.
• A measure of standing. How many people arrive already knowing your name, how many mention a specific page when they call, how many come back. These move slowly, which is exactly why they are worth watching.
• One number peculiar to your trade. Seats filled, routes quoted, units shipped, files opened. It is usually the number you already look at on Monday morning, and it belongs in the set.

What gets rejected, in writing and with the reason attached: raw visits, follower counts, “engagement”, time on page, and any standing for a phrase nobody buys with. All of them can rise while the business gets quieter, and a measure that can do that is not a measure of anything you care about.

What you get

The KPI sheet. One page. Each measure in a row: its plain definition, the source it comes from, who pulls it, how often, and what counts and what does not. The definitions are deliberately fussy, because the arguments always happen at the edges.

The baseline. Each measure as it stands today, with the date. Without this the first three months of reporting have nothing to sit against, and every figure in them is unreadable.

The rejected list. The measures we considered and set aside, and why. This is the page you hand to whoever proposes adding another widget in six months.

A worked example

An illustration. A commercial cleaning company in Winnipeg has been blogging for two years and reports monthly on visits, which have roughly doubled. Inquiries have not changed. In the session it emerges that the sales manager already keeps a spreadsheet of every quote request, with a column for whether the building is above a certain size, because smaller buildings are rarely profitable.

The four measures chosen are: quote requests from buildings above that size; whether a request names the industry it is in, which the manager can judge in seconds and which turns out to predict whether the quote closes; requests from people who typed the company name rather than a general phrase; and square footage under contract, which the owner tracks anyway. Visits are dropped from the report entirely. The first baseline takes an afternoon to assemble from the spreadsheet the manager already had.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. What you sell, who decides, and what you currently look at. No charge.
2. Access and a conversation. Read-only access to analytics and whatever records inquiries, plus twenty minutes with whoever answers the phone. That conversation usually decides the quality measure.
3. The draft. Three to five working days. A shortlist of six measures with the case for and against each one.
4. The sign-off. A short call to cut six down to three or four. The sheet and the baseline arrive the same week.

What it costs

Choosing the measures is included in a 90-day plan and in every month of the ongoing service; the bands for both are on the pricing page. On its own it is a small fixed fee in CAD, quoted after the half-hour call once I know how many separate sources the numbers have to come from, and agreed in writing before anything starts.

What happens next

Most people do the obvious next thing and start a monthly report against the new measures. Every third month that report becomes the quarterly review, where the targets themselves are questioned rather than just the results. Some businesses would rather see the same figures on a screen than on paper, which is a live dashboard. None of that is assumed. Agreeing the measures is a complete piece of work, and it is worth having even if nothing follows it.