Mary, a content manager who oversees content marketing operations in her organization, needs help creating and establishing reporting KPIs to monitor her team’s performance. She wants to understand more about the KPIs and metrics that measure progress and decides to invest in robust enterprise reporting solutions to create intuitive reports and dashboards.

Compare Top Enterprise Reporting Software Leaders

This Article Covers:

• What Are Reporting KPIs?
• Benefits
• KPI Report Types
• How To Create KPI Reports

What Are Reporting KPIs?

Reporting KPIs are metrics that help you understand business progress, identify bottlenecks, make process amendments and devise strategies to achieve long-term objectives. They provide a realistic perspective on organizations’ financial performance indicators, risk factors and opportunities. A KPI report typically consists of charts, graphs and tabular data.

A KPI report displaying key financial metrics. Source

Reporting KPIs allows you to:

• Organize information on the dashboards.
• Identify trends, patterns and relationships between data points to make robust decisions.

For instance, a product-based company hires a digital marketing agency to promote its products and services. The reporting KPIs for the agency might look like this:

Objective: Increase conversion rates by 50% in six months for a product company.

Measurement: Total conversions obtained by combining leads from different channels.

Activities: Curate robust marketing campaigns and strategies to generate leads from all channels, including social media, websites, emails, Google Ads and others.

Responsible Resource: The onus of monitoring lead generation activities and analyzing performance lies with the digital marketing manager.

Review: Review metrics at the end of each month to track progress.

Compare Top Enterprise Reporting Software Leaders

Primary Benefits

Setting up concrete KPIs helps you attain pre-defined objectives within a limited time frame. Let’s look at the other benefits that provide a competitive advantage:

Set Benchmarks: Set benchmarks to evolve, scale and improve processes to meet goals and objectives. Establish and monitor KPIs to gain insight into customer behavior, supply chain management, financial performance and more.

Discover Issues or Changes: Compare current performance with high-level targets to determine progress, prioritize outcomes and take proactive measures to achieve goals.

Make Data-driven Decisions: Consolidate critical business information into a centralized location to eliminate data silos, boost visibility, set objectives, increase performance, allocate investment and improve user workflows.

Boost Collaboration: Obtain a high-level overview of business performance. Facilitate communication between team members to discuss issues, bottlenecks, opportunities and growth.

Perform Robust Analysis: Monitor and analyze KPIs in real time to see which decisions and investments are lucrative, thus facilitating proactive analysis to drive long-term financial outcomes.

Compare Top Enterprise Reporting Software Leaders

Types

Let’s understand the different types of KPI reports that serve different purposes:

Strategic: Strategic KPIs provide a high-level snapshot of an organization’s performance. Profit margin, total revenue and ROI are examples of strategic KPIs.

Operational: Operational KPIs measure an organization’s performance over time by gauging different geographical locations, segments or processes. For instance, if executives see a decreasing profit trend in a specific region, they can create an operational report to understand the reason behind declining product lines.

Functional: Many KPIs connect to specific functions such as IT, finance, marketing and sales, recruitment and others. Sales teams track average order value, new inbound leads, conversion rates and more to measure sales performance. Finance managers track financial progress through gross profit margins, operating expense ratios and more.

Leading and Lagging KPIs: Leading KPIs forecast outcomes, while lagging KPIs measure results after implementing new processes or amending existing ones. For instance, if a business plans to launch a new product, leading indicators predict future results, while lagging indicators show the actual outcomes post solution implementation.

How To Create KPI Reports

Create interactive and dynamic reports with the organization’s strategies, objectives, goals and needs in mind. Drill down into data to unearth valuable insights.

Consider the following factors while creating KPI reports:

Define Objectives

Every business has unique KPIs and metrics depending on its size, industry, target audience and objectives. To gauge which KPIs prove valuable to your business, you should collaborate with key stakeholders to discuss quantitative and qualitative benchmarks for measuring performance.

Select Robust KPIs

Choose KPIs that monitor progress in sales and marketing, customer service, supply chain and other departments. Identify bottlenecks and challenges in different business processes to take corrective actions.

Audit Data Sources

BI tools consolidate information from different sources via data connectors to create robust reports and dashboards. Performing an audit of data sources is crucial to ensure accuracy.

Before creating reports, ensure that the data sources are adept with the organization’s objectives and are suitable to the pre-defined KPIs. Streamline efforts toward analyzing the correct data and garnering critical insights. For instance, HR managers need internal and external labor market information to conduct workforce planning.

Create and Customize Reports

Once you’ve established the KPIs and examined the critical data sources, configure reports and customize them to suit your needs. Monitor, evaluate and visualize KPIs with the help of intuitive dashboards to track progress, optimize performance and facilitate growth.

Drill down into reports and dashboards to monitor intricate details and share insights with teams.

Compare Top Enterprise Reporting Software Leaders

Conclusion

Reporting KPIs present valuable insights in a cohesive, visually-appealing format to facilitate internal communications, create seamless processes and promote data-driven decisions. They also help you set feasible goals and benchmarks, track progress and gain a competitive edge.

What reporting KPIs do you use to measure performance and growth? Let us know in the comments below.