Data vs Metrics vs KPI: Understanding the Differences (+ Examples)

What is essential for your business Data, Metrics or KPI?

In addition to playing an important role in your business growth, each of these quantifiable measures also has its own unique characteristics. It all depends on what you are looking for from the different KPI metrics, data and other metrics.

Let’s have a look.

Data

Data is nothing but facts and statistics collected over a period of time for reference or analysis. Examples of data include individual pricing, revenue, dates, and surveys. It could mean keeping an eye on the supply chain and inventory, customer feedback, web traffic analysis or anything else.

Why is data important?

• It helps in making decisions
• It makes a company more efficient
• Solves critical problems easily
• Functions within the company improve

Metrics

Metrics is a system which forms the basis for the standard of measurement. It is a group of information on a product webpage, website, or marketing initiatives that helps track performance for specific functions. It is crucial to measure metrics for actual growth.

Examples of metrics are traffic, leads, profit margin, growth rate, and more.

These include the reach of the product, connectivity with the audience and efficiency ratio.

Why are metrics important?

• Metrics provide objective measures of performance, so they help managers make informed decisions
• It helps to guide an organisation’s success
• It speaks a lot about your target audience and their preferences
• Helps you to create content that ranks high in search engines, to attract views

KPI

A key performance indicator (KPI) is a quantifiable measure of metrics that monitor the performance of your business for a specific period of time for a particular task or objective.

Examples of KPIs would be google analytics metrics and social media metrics.

Why is KPI important?

• It gives you a metric to compare with your current performance
• It helps you to set goals, devise your strategy and also evaluate your performance
• It helps to keep the team focused towards a common goal
• It helps in holding your team accountable

Difference between KPI and Metrics

The key difference between KPIs and metrics is that KPIs help to measure your company’s specified goals. In contrast, metrics help in providing context for your business activities; it covers the overall business.

In understanding KPIs, you need to know that all KPIs are metrics, but all metrics are not KPIs.
Various metrics are available online; however, not all can track sales growth. Therefore, the difference between KPI and metrics would be the word ‘key’ in KPI.
Metrics provide numerous data points; however, KPIs help convert the data into meaningful goals by focusing on specific tasks and objectives.

KPI metric examples are as follows:

Google Analytics Metrics

Google Analytics gives you a better understanding of who visits your sites and their interests. It helps you to track locations and know more about their cultural preferences.

Different KPI metrics give you an idea about how a customer visits your page or website. For example, do they come from paid portals or unpaid portals?

You also get an idea of how many customers are just viewing the website pages or if they are converting their visits into buying decisions. All of this information help with creating correct marketing strategies.

Suppose your KPI is to get 1000 registrations for your services by the end of the month. But to reach that one goal, you need to measure how many people are signing up, the number of visitors to your website or ad, the number of ad clicks, and the conversion rate of the landing page or ad.

Here, the ultimate goal is to get 1000 registrations, which is your KPI. The other measurements, like the number of sign-ups, ad clicks, etc., will be your metrics.

Business KPI metrics from GA also allow you to keep track of the inflow and outflow of the customer, which further assists in creating targeted advertisements for upcoming products.

Social Media Metrics

Customers today don’t just look at websites. They are very keen on following social media and keeping in touch with the current information about their favourite products.

Your goals and target settings determine which social media metrics matter the most to you, as there is so much information on social media. Therefore, sieving through all the information is essential.

The virality rate is one of social media metrics’ most valuable and important aspects. Once you know that your product has gone viral and garnered attention from the audience, the chances of a conversion rate increase as the product become a fad.

Impressions count on social media metrics. So it is not just about how many people have viewed your products through ads or other means but also how many times one customer watches and re-watches the ad matters too.

Let’s say you set a target of X number of lead generation for your social media ad campaigns this quarter. Then, your business KPI metrics are the number of leads, but to track this, you have to monitor other metrics like CTR or bounce rate.

A lot of different aspects of social media aspects fall under the category of engagement. This tool tells you how effective or ineffective your brand’s campaigning strategies are. You get to know how and when, and how often your audience engages.

SEO Metrics

SEO helps with your site’s technical configuration and keeps your content relevant. It even assists your web content to remain popular towards user search queries for search engines to rank them better.

SEO metrics help you to catch both opportunities and threats. In addition, it allows you to take corrective measures at the right time and make changes if something is wrong.

SEO metrics are constantly changing, and it is essential to remain updated with the new algorithm. These updates will ensure that your site is optimised correctly and provide you with the benefits your business needs.

SEO metrics will help you to keep track of information like authority scores, backlinks, page views, traffic data and even target keyword ratings.

On SEO measure metrics, you can track the exit pages for organic traffic, bounce rate, and pages crawled per day. But gaining SOV for improved local visibility could be your KPI.

SEO is the most cost-effective of all the available metrics. It is an excellent way to acquire and retain customers and helps you play the long game too.

Access to All Information At Once

Having all the metrics, data, and KPIs in hand for a business is great. But all of this information can get overwhelming to process in one go.

Thus, creating dashboards, an online business dashboard, helps you access all of your business information.

It is a safe and visually pleasing way to consume data. In addition, dashboards provide a dynamic approach to presenting your data as opposed to its predecessors like PowerPoint or an Excel sheet.

Understanding the difference between KPIs and metrics will help you to create a more effective dashboard for your organisation.

Measure What Matters with Weavr

Weavr is a digital platform that provides users with a single dashboard view of your entire business.

It includes advertising investments on Facebook, Instagram, and Google, website traffic performance, amazon performance, and app performance all under one roof.

It single-handedly takes care of all the information regarding your business. It enables your business to have clarity and make wiser choices by gauging your past and present performance. And create a better and wiser trajectory for your business.