For any marketing program or campaign, you will generate a bunch of metrics. Some will flow naturally out of the program, some will be shoehorned into it based on requests from higher up. Either way, you will likely spend a good chunk of your time defining, collecting, analyzing, and reporting various types of performance (or ROI, or activity…) metrics.

The important thing is to understand which metrics matter.

There are three ways that a metric matters:

1. It tells you what’s happening (activity metric). Often you infer that if you do lots of Action A, then something positive happens to Outcome B. So step 1 is seeing if your program or campaign is firing on all cylinders, and tracking those activities. # of presentations given, # of butts in seats, # of subscribers to a the e-newsletter, # of posts in an online community. Just be very (VERY) careful about confusing activity metrics with actual results. Most often, they aren’t. They simply tell you if your program or campaign is functioning, not if it’s working. Too often this gets confused – because you can track it, and because there are lots of #’s spinning around, doesn’t mean you should report it up the chain. Often however this is exactly what “up the chain” asks for, so be ready to argue for #2 below. Activity metrics are best used as a project management tool.

2. It tells you if things are working (performance, impact or ROI metrics). Turning activity metrics into impact metrics. ROI is simply a fancy way of saying “what are we getting for our time and money?” Impact is how you should think of it. What impact are you having on your customers or audiences? Are you driving more sales or measurably increasingly customer satisfaction? Often these are the hardest to get because a) they are the most difficult to measure or b) the connection between activity and outcome isn’t clearly understood (or both). But this is what matters – it’s what SHOULD be reported in #3 below, but if it isn’t, always have it ready to bust out come review and planning time.

3. It matters to senior management. This may NOT be the same as #2, unfortunately – no matter what makes the most sense, some things appears on executive scorecards that just aren’t truly reflective of the unique impact of your program. They are there because senior management understands the data in that specific way, or they are seeking apples to apple comparisons with other like programs. It’s your job to think like they do, and make sure that metric is as representative as possible of your program’s impact. You may have to use footnotes, or argue for weeks about getting a mention on an appendix slide, whatever. But never lose sight of which metrics matter to the bosses. Otherwise your program could rock and rool yet get defunded or dropped all at the same time.