Tracking KPIs can be crucial as both a measure for knowing how your company is performing and to keep your team aligned and focused on your goals. With all the recent ground-breaking advancements in technology, especially in the AI space you may have wondered how it can be used to help with your data and analytics. There are ways you can take your data beyond dashboards, especially when it comes to KPI reporting. We’ll show you how you can automate tracking and monitoring, and surface key changes and trends in your data, so you instantly know what’s moving the needle. No more guessing why your numbers jumped or dropped, or spending hours pouring over spreadsheets and dashboards. This guide will cover everything you need to know about a modern approach to KPI reporting, starting with the basics:
What is KPI reporting?
KPI reporting refers to the process of tracking and monitoring key performance indicators, which are metrics that measure how well your business or teams are performing. As a marketer, you know how important data-driven decisions are. KPI reporting gives you the data you need to see what’s on track and what’s not.
Utilizing a KPI dashboard or report allows you to visually monitor and track your KPIs instantly, its great for seeing at a glance how you are doing this period compared to the last period, and how close to your goals you are:
What Are KPIs and Why Measure Them?
Key Performance Indicators or KPIs are metrics used to determine how well a company is achieving its key business objectives. For marketers, KPIs measure the success and impact of marketing campaigns and initiatives. By monitoring your KPIs regularly, you gain valuable insights into your successes and where you might need to make changes.
What Are The Benefits Of KPI Tracking?
There are several benefits to actively measuring and monitoring your marketing KPIs:
- Identify opportunities for improvement. See where your metrics are lagging and make adjustments to boost performance. For example, if traffic from social media is lower than expected, you may need to be more active on those channels.
- Track progress towards goals. Ensure your marketing strategy is moving the needle on key goals like increasing brand awareness, driving more traffic, or generating leads. Make sure you’re on track and take corrective action if needed.
- Measure marketing ROI. Determine if your marketing spend and resources are generating a good return on investment. See which campaigns and channels are most effective so you can allocate your budget accordingly.
- Spot trends and patterns. Notice trends in your metrics over time to gain useful insights. See how factors like seasonality, economic changes or current events may be impacting your KPIs. Use those learnings to optimize your future marketing plans.
- Provide data-driven decisions. Rely on concrete metrics and insights instead of guesses or intuition when making important marketing decisions. KPIs give you the facts you need to choose the right path forward.
- Gain stakeholder buy-in. Share regular KPI reports with executives, managers and key stakeholders to demonstrate the impact of your marketing. This helps justify your budget and resources while also keeping everyone aligned on priorities.
Choosing the right KPIs (and the right amount)
The key is to choose KPIs that actually matter for your business and marketing goals. In a world where 80% of people already feel like they have information overload, it’s important to strike a balance between having enough data to make informed decisions, but not being overwhelmed by too many metrics. We recommend focusing on the most relevant and impactful KPIs that align with your business goals. For example; Transactions, organic new users, or conversions specific to your onboarding process may be important metrics to track for a quarter. Whereas so called ‘vanity metrics’ such as Bounce rate will be less effective.
At Go-Insights, we recommend setting between 4-8 high level KPIs to track.
The selected KPIs should then be discussed and revised at least every quarter to ensure they reflect current and future business goals.
What makes a good KPI?
For your KPIs to be effective, ensure your objectives and goals are SMART:
Setting SMART KPIs:
- Specific: Each KPI should clearly define what it measures and why it’s important.
- Measurable: The KPI must be quantifiable using accessible data.
- Achievable: You must be able to take actions to meet the KPI.
- Relevant: The KPI must align with organizational goals and objectives.
- Time-bound: The KPI should be reported frequently enough to enable timely adjustments.
When deciding on a KPI, ask:
- What is your organization’s vision and strategy?
- Which metrics indicate you’re pursuing your vision and strategy?
- What benchmarks will you use?
- How could the KPIs be manipulated, and how will you prevent that?
- How can I track this KPI?
For example, “Increase sales leads by 10% during the next financial quarter” is a SMART KPI: it’s specific, measurable, achievable within a time frame, relevant to sales goals and company strategy.
Common marketing KPIs include:
- Website Traffic: The number of visitors to your website shows how much interest there is in your brand and content. Analyse trends in traffic sources, pages visited and bounce rates to see how engaging your site is. Traffic KPIs give you an overview of how your digital marketing campaigns are performing.
- Conversion Rates: Whether it’s newsletter signups, contact form submissions or purchases, track how many visitors complete a desired action. Improve conversion rates by optimising your site for mobile, simplifying forms and checkout processes, and targeting high-intent traffic.
- Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): Knowing your CAC helps determine how much to spend to gain a new customer. Calculate your CAC by dividing your total marketing spend by the number of new customers acquired in a given period. Aim for a CAC that balances sustainable growth with healthy profit margins.
- Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): Your CLV represents how much revenue you can generate from a customer over the lifetime of your relationship. It’s calculated by multiplying your average transaction value by your customer retention rate. Focus marketing direction on attracting high-value, long-term customers that will yield a higher CLV.
- Return on Investment: At the end of the day, marketing ROI determines if your efforts are genuinely paying off. Calculate your return on investment (ROI) by dividing the revenue or profit from a campaign by the total cost of the campaign. A positive ROI means the campaign was worthwhile. A negative ROI signals it’s time to reevaluate your strategy.
Although these are common KPIs they might not be the right ones for your organization. Every business is unique and so will have a unique set of KPIs, make sure you take time to work out yours so you can focus on the ones that truly matter for sustainable success. We recommend giving Roman Pichler’s article on choosing the right KPI’s a read, here he covers how using your product road map and product strategy can help determine KPIs.
Taking KPI reporting beyond dashboards
Once you have determined your KPIs, you can start to build a framework for measuring and reporting on them. Most KPIs can be measured using the tools and datasources your organization already uses. You’ll want to choose a KPI reporting software with built-in integrations to make setup easy.
Many KPI reporting tools will show you simple charts of your current KPI values and give you the ability to change the date range. Although this is useful for seeing at a glance your metrics, it does not answer the next questions you have, how far from our target are we? why did X change this week? What has caused that uplift in Y?
The next generation in KPI dashboards show you more than what changed. They show you why it happened and give you an indication of whether you will meet your goals:
We will cover these two big improvements on traditional KPI reporting;
#1 Setting goals for KPIs
For every KPI there will be an ideal value or goal that your organisation wishes it to be, whether it is to maintain the same value or to grow. Seeing your KPI metric without your goal takes away the health context of your KPI, you don’t know which way it is pointing. The Go-Insights KPI dashboard shows you a clear traffic light system of red vs green; whether you are on track or not. It uses predictive analytics to work out what the end value is likely to be so you can see your trajectory. By setting a goal against each KPI you can also know when you have achieved that goal.
These are the key benefits of goal setting against KPIs:
- KPI health indication: See a clear indication of the health of your KPIs so you know easily when to take action.
- Forecasting predictions, such as ad spend, revenue projection, or conversions. By using forecasting predictions you can see where you are likely to be in comparison to where you want to be. For example, if your ad spend is going to be way over you can make a change before you over spend.
- Celebrating wins with colleagues and clients. If you don’t know what success looks like you won’t know when you have reached it. By setting a goal and receiving a notification when you have reached it you can share it with your colleagues and stakeolders to help boost motivation and keep everyone involved.
#2 Going deeper into your KPI metrics
After reviewing your KPI dashboard, you may have questions about the data. You might have spotted changes compared to the previous period, notable spikes and dips, or emerging or ongoing trends. The next logical step is determining why, though this typically requires time and expertise to uncover. While computers excel at analyzing data, traditionally we use them as tools while doing the manual work ourselves. However, with algorithms and artificial intelligence, we can now automate much of that manual analysis.
Here’s what’s now possible:
- Instantly detect trends and anomalies in data and how they’re changing over time
- Identify the root causes of any changes by analyzing related metrics and dimensions that contribute to the change. For example, if your average page position increased by a few places, it will show you which pages or keywords caused that change.
- By analyzing data daily, you can be notified quickly of positive or negative changes, allowing you to respond rapidly.
- As noted earlier, 80% of workers feel overwhelmed by data. It’s difficult to manually check everything that’s changed; a system that scans everything won’t miss changes a human might.
Automated analysis in practice
Let’s look at some examples of how automated analysis can benefit your business:
Marketing: Monitoring changes in SEO metrics can reveal drops in organic traffic that warrant optimizing specific pages. Monitoring social media metrics could reveal a negative brand sentiment that requires a response.
Sales: By detecting anomalies in your sales data, you could be alerted when a particular product or customer segment starts underperforming. You can then investigate the root cause, whether it’s pricing, inventory issues, or lack of marketing.
In these examples, the automated analysis acts as an “early warning system” that detects problems and opportunities within your data that a human may miss by only reviewing high-level dashboards. The insights can then guide actions to keep your business running smoothly and meeting its goals.
As you work to improve your KPI reporting, don’t neglect the opportunity for deeper insight through automated analysis of the data behind those KPIs.
4 steps to tracking KPI Performance
01 Connect your datasources
Once you have identified the KPIs you want to track you need to ensure you have a reliable measurement for each which can be accessed frequently and easily. This data can be pulled straight from the tools your company already uses for example Google Analytics. The first step is to head to go-insights.com and connect all the data sources which contain the data for your KPIs. You can do this in a few clicks. Create your account, then click to connect your data sources.
02 Select your KPIs
Next, you can go through and select all the KPIs you want to track. A list of suggested KPIs will be shown at the top. These are surfaced based on your data, for example your custom conversion events from GA4 and if you connected Google Search console or your Ad accounts relevant SEO and ad metrics will show there.
03 Choose who should receive automated KPI reports
We recommend reviewing your KPIs every week. You can receive an automated KPI report straight to your team every Monday at noon. 12pm is usually a good time to see what changes happened in your business the week before. You can choose to send reports into Slack, email or MS Teams. By sending the KPI report into a group channel where your team often collaborate you will find it is more likely to be reviewed and discussed.
04 Review your weekly KPI reports
Your weekly KPI report will show you an easy-to-read overview of your KPIs, as well as insights into the factors driving changes in the data. Along the top of the report you’ll see which KPIs are ‘on track’ or ‘off track’ based on the goals you set and you’ll see the value of each KPI with a comparison to the previous week. Below the KPI cards you will also see all the insights which have been found, these include things like notable new trends, spikes, drops, new pages found and key word shifts. You’ll not just see what was found but the things which likely caused those changes this eliminates the need for you to manually analyze spreadsheets or dashboards to understand your performance.
Future trends in KPI Reporting
As a marketer, KPI reporting is essential for understanding what’s working and optimizing your efforts. But compiling reports and analyzing campaign data used to require hours of tedious work. In 2024, AI and automation have transformed how companies track and analyze their KPIs. With AI-powered solutions like Go–Insights, insights about your key metrics are automatically generated for you.
Moving into 2025 and beyond, AI will continue to transform KPI reporting for marketers. Here are a few trends to keep an eye on:
Deeper insights from data modeling. AI algorithms will uncover patterns and correlations in your data that no human analyst could find. This will yield insights into how different tactics and campaigns truly impact your bottom line.
Predictive analytics and forecasting. AI will enable marketers to predict future performance based on historical data and current trends. This allows you to be proactive and adjust strategies ahead of time instead of reacting after the fact.
Automated action recommendations. Based on its analysis of your data and objectives, AI systems will begin recommending specific actions for you to take. This could include changing ad copy, budgets, or targeting. Over time, AI may even execute some optimizations autonomously.
As AI takes on more of the reporting and analysis workload, marketers will have more time to spend on creative, big picture strategy and testing new ideas. AI-powered KPI reporting will transform marketing from a reactive function to a proactive driver of business growth. Those marketers who learn to leverage these tools effectively will gain a significant competitive edge in 2025 and beyond.
FAQs on KPI Reporting
Wrapping up
In 2024, AI-powered KPI reporting solutions give marketers superpowers. You get a crystal-clear view of what’s working, what’s not, and what you can improve in your marketing—all without having to become a data scientist. AI does the analysis for you so you can spend more time optimizing your campaigns and less time crunching numbers. The future of marketing is AI, and it’s here to make your life easier. Just imagine how much time you’ll save by automating all that data analysis with a tool like Go-Insights. Get those key insights into your metrics so you can focus on strategy, not spreadsheets.
