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Dec 7, 2012

Web Analytics Scorecards--a CMO's Best Friend

A scorecard is a great way to show progress on tactics and hold your team accountable. Here's what yours should look like.

Scoreboard

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As a CMO, you don't have the time to develop a deep understanding of each team member's processes on a day-to-day basis. You need an abridged version of your team's performance that can empower you to make smart decisions. A scorecard is a great way to show progress on tactics and hold your team accountable. A team scorecard consists of the top departmental KPIs that provide insight into strategy progress, goal achievement, and ROI. A scorecard should be brief and to the point and contain no more than 12 tracked goals.

Download an Internet Marketing Scorecard Example to get a head start.

Categories

Each of your departmental KPIs should fit within the main KPI categories of Conversions, Traffic, Content, and Budget. Your organization should be tracking so many conversions that they need to be grouped for a scorecard format. You could include conversion groups such as:

• E-Commerce (sales, conversion rates, gross margins)

• Social Media (re-tweets, FB likes, Linkedin mentions, conversion attribution)

• Email (opens, click-thrus, subscriber growth, conversion attribution)

• Retargeting (cost per acquisition, conversion attribution)

• Branding (website & email micro-conversions)

• Budget (departmental budget usage statistics)

Traffic is also important to measure to normalize your web conversion KPIs and make sure that you are not only increasing traffic but also continuing to convert your traffic at the same or better rates.

Content creation is what drives most inbound marketing channels so be sure to track growth and quality metrics related to created content such as blog posts, webinar presentations, and all earned and owned media.

Key Performance Indicators

Include the most important KPIs to each category or create summary KPI groups if you have too many for one scorecard. There are example KPI’s on the Internet Marketing Scorecard Example listed above and I also provided a list of my Top 5 KPIs if you need some inspiration.

YTD Goal vs. Actual

Forecast all of the YTD goals for each month for all KPIs on the scorecard. As you move forward throughout the year, fill in the actual number just under the goal. Also be sure to color the actual cell green or red. Green is an actual figure that is greater than 90% of the projected goal and red represents an actual figure that is less than 90% of the projected goal. This will provide the ability to understand the team’s performance at first glance.

I have yet to find an executive that doesn't like the scorecard method. It is concise and enables informed decision making at the strategic level. Download an example of the Internet Marketing Scorecard and build yours today.


Aaron Aders is co-founder and chief strategy officer of Indianapolis-based Slingshot SEO, a national leader in online marketing, planning, and execution. Aders steers the strategic vision behind software and business processes. @SlingshotSEO