Friday, October 31, 2014

What Is the Meaning of Key Performance Indicators? - meaning of kpi

What Is the Meaning of Key Performance Indicators? -  meaning of kpi

In this post, you can ref free useful materials about meaning of kpi and other materials for meaning of kpi such as kpi tips, kpi mistakes, kpi examples, kpi templates, kpi dashboard, kpi form, how to create kpi/performance metrics
If you need free ebook:

• List of free 2436 KPIs
• Top 28 performance appraisal forms
• 11 performance appraisal methods
• 1125 performance review phrases

please visit: kpi123.com

KPI guides


Key performance indicators are an important tool for measuring firm performance. Managers should understand what key performance measures are as well as their purpose and benefits. Understanding key performance indicators will allow managers to use them for the benefit of the firm, which can lead to improved company performance.
Definition
In business, the term 'key performance indicators' refers to measurable metrics that are used to evaluate the performance of a company. They are not, however, just any measure of performance; because they are "key" performance indicators, they represent only the most important measures of a company's performance.
Types
There are several types of key performance indicators. The most commonly used indicators in business are financial indicators such as return on investment, profits and market share. Key performance indicators can also be used to measure things such as firm reputation, brand recognition and customer satisfaction. Which key performance indicators are relevant will depend entirely on the individual business and its strategy.
Purpose
The purpose of key performance indicators is to measure and monitor the performance of a firm. Firms will typically examine key performance indicators with the expectation that they will improve over time. When they do not improve it can indicate an underlying problem that needs to be addressed. Key performance indicators can be used to support the overall strategy of a firm and to monitor the progress towards achieving firm goals.
Advantages

The use of key performance indicators can increase firm performance by allowing businesses to monitor performance and to make adjustments in order to improve it. Because key performance indicators represent only the most important performance measures for a firm, it is possible to focus on them and to ignore other metrics. This allows a firm to be more efficient and to spend less time and fewer resources when analyzing performance.
What is a Key Performance Indicator (KPI)
How to Develop Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Thursday, October 30, 2014

How To Define and Select Good KPIs for Your Business- meaning of kpi

How To Define and Select Good KPIs for Your Business-  meaning of kpi


In this post, you can ref free useful materials about meaning of kpi and other materials for marketing kpi such as kpi tips, kpi mistakes, kpi examples, kpi templates, kpi dashboard, kpi form, how to create kpi/performance metrics
If you need free ebook:

• List of free 2436 KPIs
• Top 28 performance appraisal forms
• 11 performance appraisal methods
• 1125 performance review phrases

please visit: kpi123.com

KPI guides


KPI (key performance indicator) is one of those buzzwords heard often in today’s business environment.  In theory, the meaning of the term is obvious enough.  However, for many companies, the implementation often poses a dilemma resulting in a pile of data with little or no actionable value.  That outcome may be due to a variety of factors, including a lack of clarity of the intent of KPIs.  This article offers a simplified definition of KPIs and suggests some criteria for selecting actionable indicators for your enterprise. 
Definition of KPIs 
A simple approach to selecting appropriate KPIs in any organization is to examine the three component words in the term: key, performance, and indicator
  • Key” suggests a leading principle; something of critical or central importance to the organization.  This means that not everything can be tagged as key – regardless of the availability and abundance of data.
  • Performance” suggests a process; an action recognizable to everyone (or at least the essential personnel) in the organization.  This means that the activity is public (within the organization or broader business arena).
  • Indicator” suggests a pointer; a gauge for a specific outcome in the organization.  This means that an indicator tracks change over time. 
Put together, KPIs are pointers that track outcomes of central importance to an organization. 
Typically, “outcomes of central importance” are formulated as business goals or objectives.  They embody the survival (success) strategy of the enterprise.  Hence, well-defined KPIs provide a basis for assessing the achievement of enterprise objectives.  Depending on the quality of the underlying data, KPIs allow for objectivity in telling a company’s success story. 
Few businesses are exempt from fluctuations in operations resulting from internal, industry, or economy-wide volatility.  Consequently, it is important to think of KPIs in terms of trends (over reasonably long periods) rather than focusing on them as a one-time measure.  It is also important to use the same definition of KPIs for the same objective to ensure consistency during the periodic performance reviews. 
Criteria for Selecting KPIs 
It is reasonable to expect that businesses in the same industry sector will have generally similar survival objectives.  However, the likelihood of operational differences means that KPIs are customizable for specific enterprise goals.  The point being that generic KPIs may not always be the best for your business. 
It is, therefore, important to have specific criteria for selecting KPIs that are consistent with the objectives of the enterprise. 
The ability to assess the components of performance constitutes an advantage in the use of key performance indicators (KPIs).  We suggest the following as desirable characteristics in good KPIs: 
1.  Strategic:  Put simply, the best KPIs originate from the central objectives of the organization.  This means that a good place to start the selection of KPIs is a thorough internal assessment of corporate objectives – particularly those considered critical to the survival of the enterprise.  The idea is to develop a set of questions or guidelines to help the company translate its objectives into actionable indicators.
An internal assessment is vital as a reference point for KPIs so that as enterprise goals change, KPIs can change accordingly.  Using a question format to develop the KPIs is effective in minimizing any fuzziness about the indicators and reinforces the links between KPIs and company objectives.
2.  Relevant:  Relevance provides meaning within the context of the organization’s hierarchy.  One of the most important reasons for tracking performance is to foster learning and improvement.  The logical approach to learn and improve is to design indicators that management and staff can identify with.
Relevance is vital to ensuring the informed participation of employees and management whose performance is critical to enterprise survival.  Additionally, relevance fosters realism in goal setting.  If the enterprise consists of multiple departments, which are engaged in multiple projects, relevance makes the monitoring of multiple goals manageable. 
3.  Quantifiable:  An enterprise mission statement is the place for lofty expressions.  KPIs, on the other hand, must be reliably quantifiable.  Measurement is what makes tracking meaningful for learning and improvement purposes.  Measurement is what adds intelligence and credibility to business decision-making.
KPIs summarize business strategy in ways that take the guesswork out of performance management.  The periodic (quarterly or annual) reviews allow for trend comparisons, assessment of set target levels, and systematic revision of goals.  Measurement minimizes subjectivity in the evaluation of individual employee and corporate achievement.  The ability to track KPIs encourages transparency in business performance metrics.
The Role of Good Data and Technology 
While the criteria for selecting good KPIs apply across all enterprises, the actual implementation is clearly a function of size.  The more complex the organizational structure and activities, the more complicated the management of business performance.  In all cases, good enterprise data is of paramount importance. 
Understandably, small companies can handle the choice of a few good KPIs, set up the data collection process, perform periodic measurements and reviews with relative ease. 
The more complicated the management structure, the more deliberation should go into the selection, measurement, and periodic reviews of KPIs.  The data requirement of medium- and large-size enterprises tends to be more than that of small enterprises.  This would explain why medium- and large-size companies are more likely to deploy IT support to facilitate the measurement and reporting of their KPIs. 
One such technology is business intelligence (BI) technology.  BI software (fully licensed onsite or acquired on a SaaS platform) provides tools for gathering, coordinating, and transforming data so that information is derived efficiently.  The more integrated the BI system, the more functionalities it offers, including data management tools, reporting tools, and dashboards for viewing and sharing results. 
An Example of KPIs for a Professional Services Consultancy 
The survival of a professional service provider depends on the number of ongoing and new projects the company handles.  Specifically, the company’s gross revenue is primarily determined by the billable hours it invoices.  KPIs for such an enterprise must be strategically linked to target growth in number of projects (not necessarily number of clients) and time billed by consultants. 
The indicators could be refined to include target levels of growth in billable hours for each category of consultants, profit center, department, and geographical location.  Data needed for tracking this type of KPI are contained in employee timesheets, which show hours billed by project.  It is relatively easy to compile the information necessary for assessing progress toward set targets, which in turn provides the gauge for company revenue growth. 
Incidentally, the professional service provider could be a large multi-national entity or a single proprietorship.  The process of tracking revenues based on billable time is similar – the main difference is the amount of data involved. 
Conclusion 
Realistically, KPIs are seldom perfect measures.  However, their usefulness for tracking organizational performance hinges on how well the indicators connect with the central objectives of the enterprise. 
Ensuring that the selected indicators are strategic, relevant, and quantifiable improves the likelihood that they will foster realism, objectivity, and transparency in performance management. 
IT support may facilitate the measurement and reporting of KPIs, especially in enterprises with complex organizational structure and activities.  Done manually or with the help of technology, good data are crucial to meaningful KPIs. 


What is a Key Performance Indicator (KPI)
How to Develop Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Wednesday, October 29, 2014

KPIs You must know in Google Analytics and their meanings - meaning of kpi

KPIs You must know in Google Analytics and their meanings -  meaning of kpi


In this post, you can ref free useful materials about meaning of kpi and other materials for meaning of kpi such as kpi tips, kpi mistakes, kpi examples, kpi templates, kpi dashboard, kpi form, how to create kpi/performance metrics
If you need free ebook:

• List of free 2436 KPIs
• Top 28 performance appraisal forms
• 11 performance appraisal methods
• 1125 performance review phrases

please visit: kpi123.com

KPI guides


KPIs mean key performance indicators. They are defined as business metrics (units of measure) that enables your organization to define, evaluate and analyze its progress towards organizational goals. KPIs do possess a signifying place in web analytics. Each website is created with certain objectives to be attained within the given time span.
KPIs provide a detailed data of the nature of our progress towards achieving the objectives of the organization. It will help us to re-establish our goals according to the analytics report of the KPIs.
It depends upon the nature of your site to select the significant KPIs. The basic KPIs in Google Analytics are covered in detail here. It is important to note that the KPIs that work for a particular site may not work for another site.
Number of visits
It studies the number of visits on a site over a specific time period. Most people analyses this KPI on a regular basis. The best practice is to set a target for this KPI, say, for over a period of one month. Try to improve your marketing strategy to achieve your aimed web traffic for the fixed period. This KPI is related to the web traffic and the majority of the web business is much concerned about its value. You should give your maximum talent to increase the value of this KPI to meet your targets. Give more attention to the trends in the visitor numbers in relation to your targets.
Pageviews
Pageviews is the total number of pages viewed on your site and is a general measure of how much your site is used. It is more useful as a basic indicator of the traffic load on your site and server rather than as a marketing measure.
Absolute Unique Visitors
“Absolute Unique Visitors” is how many visitors (people) came to your site, counting each person only once for the entire time period. Google Analytics seem to use IP adresse + User Agent + First Party Cookies to identify a visitor. Unique visitor is an ultimate measure to reflect the number of people that visited your site.
Bounce rate
Bounce Rate is the percentage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page). Bounce Rate is a measure of visit quality and a high Bounce Rate generally indicates that site entrance (landing) pages aren’t relevant to your visitors. You can minimize Bounce Rates by tailoring landing pages to each keyword and ad that you run.
Landing pages should provide the information and services that were promised in the ad copy.
High bounce rate means that the visitor was not attracted by the attributes of your site and visitors retracted their steps. The satisfaction of visitors is what matters here most. The main reason for this phenomenon is inappropriate content according to their taste on the landing page, unalluring design and technical problems.
It is clear from the above description that lower bounce rate is the indication of the success of your online marketing strategies. Your website is functioning in the best possible way according to your best efforts. Try to analyze the data of the bounce rate based on the trends in a given period of time rather than on daily basis, and by content or pages. A point to be noted here is that higher bounce rate does not always show a poor website performance. For example, in the case of blogs, a visitor may be directed to your website to read only a particular article in a particular page.
Time on site
Time on Site is one way of measuring visit quality. If visitors spend a long time visiting your site, they may be interacting extensively with it. However, Time on Site can be misleading because visitors often leave browser windows open when they are not actually viewing or using your site.
Conversion rate
For a non-ecommerce site, Conversion Rate is the primary metric for assessing how well marketing, site, and content work together to achieve business objectives. Conversion Rate is the percentage of visits that result in the visitor taking an action that you have defined as important to your business.
Every website is created with a pre-defined goal. It may be of various natures such as to contact the organization, to fill in a registration form or to purchase a product. In the case of blogs the goal may be to subscribe to the RSS feed. Thus, goals differ.
Conversion rate is an effective KPI that help to monitor the goals of the website. It is the rate at which the visitors take your goals or positive measures. If you have a high conversion rate, then it indicates that you have made a considerable amount of customers act according to your wishes in your website. To manage a high conversion rate your site should have the perfect mix of quality web traffic, an excellently managed customer experience or the right product offerings as a business.
The conversion rate KPI extracts the best value of such good measures. Google Analytics provide you with enormous stats of all the factors that affect the conversion rate. If you make improvements to your customer experience, your conversion rate will really improve. Blaming your low conversion rate on low traffic volume or the particular period of the year is bad practice.
Traffic sources
Google Analytics traffic sources report provides an overview of the different kinds of sources that send traffic to your site. The graph shows traffic trends; the pie-chart and tables show the traffic sources driving the trends. “Direct Traffic” is visits from people who clicked a bookmark to come to your site or who typed your site URL directly into their browser. “Referring Sites” shows visits from people who clicked to your site from another site. “Search Engines” shows visits from people who clicked to your site from a search engine result page.
Now, search engines marketing is on the top list of online marketing. Most of the organizations try hard to move up the search engine rankings for a better web traffic. This KPI will analyze the nature of the sources from which your web traffic has arrived on your sites. Depending entirely on search engines is a risky thing. If we depend on search engines for 90% of web traffic, then think about the day, suppose, when Google modify their algorithm or may remove your company from their database. This will put a sudden stop to your major revenue share. Therefore, it is better to increase your traffic from all sources including the small traffic sources over time. It will help you to stand in the long run.
Make sure that your Google Analytics report of traffic sources should not show any source of traffic dominating for a long period, unless it is part of your strategies. Keywords data shows the actual keywords used in search that referred traffic to the site. Additionally, Google Analytics is capable of segmenting the keywords by paid, non-paid (organic), and overall. Carefully monitor how your added or changed content affects the keywords searched over a period of time.
E-commerce
Google Analytics is great for tracking e-commerce transactions. There are various KPIs under e-commerce report, and it will help you measure your site’s success to your revenue and sales over time.
Here are some KPIs under e-commerce are:
Total Revenue: Revenue is determined by the number of purchases and the average purchase value. Some important steps you can take to maximize revenue are:
– Purchase targeted advertising and write effective ads (see the Traffic Sources reports)
– Make sure your landing pages show the information, services, or products that you promise in your ads (review the Content reports to help minimize bounce rates)
– Simplify your conversion funnels so that fewer would-be customers abandon the checkout process (review the Goals reports)
Conversion Rate: This report shows the rate at which visits to your site result in purchases. Tracking conversion rates over time is an effective way of determining whether your marketing and website are becoming more or less efficient at turning visitors into customers. Note that conversion rates are most useful as company-specific benchmarks against which to assess marketing and site effectiveness because conversion rates vary considerably across businesses (even within the same industry).
Average Order Value: Tracking changes to the average order value over time is important to catalog sites that may change and shift which products and services they are actively marketing. Many ecommerce sites monitor this metric to see if cross promotions are working. This is an important metric that works its way into many higher level executive and shareholder reports.
Product Overview (Product Performance): How much of each product do you sell? This report shows the number of items sold, the total revenue, the average price, and the average order quantity for each product you sell online. Click any SKU to drill down and view detail.
Product SKUs (Product Performance): This report shows the number of items for each SKU sold, the total revenue, the average price, and the average order quantity for each product you sell online.
Categories (Product Performance): How much of each product category, product, and SKU do you sell? For ecommerce sites, understanding which products are selling online is crucial for generating relevant content, promotions and advertisements. This report shows the number of items sold, the total revenue, the average price, and the average order quantity for each product you sell online.
Transactions: This report is a list of all transactions on your site, useful for auditing your transactions.
Visits to Purchase: How many visits does it take for visitors to purchase? Understanding your sales cycle is important to the overall success of your site. This report helps you understand how many visits it takes to convert your visitors into customers and, by extension, the kind of content you need to create in order to reach your prospects.
Time to Purchase: How long does it take before visitors make a purchase? Understanding your sales cycle is important to the overall success of your site. This report helps you understand how long it takes to convert your visitors into customers and, by extension, the kind of content you need to create in order to reach your prospects.


What is a Key Performance Indicator (KPI)
How to Develop Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)