What Are KPIs? Understanding KPIs vs. Metrics

A key performance indicator (KPI) is a quantifiable measure demonstrating the effectiveness of an organization, department, or individual's strategic goals and objectives. KPIs in business can vary by scope, scale, and timeframe, covering both high-level strategic objectives and tactical outcomes. They serve as a gauge for strategic performance, helping stakeholders assess progress, guide strategy, and drive business outcomes. 

KPIs and metrics are closely related but serve distinct roles in assessing performance and progress. While all KPIs are metrics, not all metrics are KPIs, meaning they aren’t tied to strategic outcomes.  

• KPIs are a subset of metrics aligned with organizational goals 
• Metrics quantitatively track and assess a specific business process 

The critical difference between KPIs and metrics is alignment. Metrics are tied to the business-as-usual work and support KPI progress, while KPIs are targets that contribute to your company goals and objectives.  

To better understand the difference between KPIs vs metrics, let’s take a look at a few examples of KPIs and metrics. 

KPI examples 

Notice how these KPIs frame an impact on business outcomes: 

• Marketing: Website conversion rate %, marketing qualified leads (MQLs) 
• Sales: Average order value, new inbound leads 
• Finance: Net profit margin, operating expense ratio 

Metrics examples 

Meanwhile, metrics are impactful but don’t necessarily tie into business outcomes directly: 

• Marketing: Website visitors, social media engagement rate, number of new leads 
• Sales: Number of outbound calls, average deal size, time to close a sale 
• Finance: EBITDA, inventory turnover, total revenue 

Leveraging a mix of KPI types ensures a comprehensive, nuanced view of your company's performance. Remember, KPIs help align teams to your strategic vision, so keep in mind the business outcomes you want to drive with your KPIs. Here are the seven main types of KPIs. 

1. Strategic KPIs: These high-level indicators directly tie into your company's goals, guiding you toward your strategic objectives (example: revenue growth) 
2. Operational KPIs: These keep your finger on the pulse of your business, focusing on the efficiency of day-to-day processes or operations (example: average customer response time) 
3. Functional KPIs: These add nuance to operational KPIs, dialing in on a departmental or functional performance (example: cost per acquisition in marketing) 
4. Quantitative KPIs: These data-driven performance metrics provide an objective basis for making business decisions (example: customer churn rate) 
5. Qualitative KPIs: These delve into non-numerical data for a rich, holistic view of your company's performance (example: customer satisfaction) 
6. Leading KPIs: These are future-looking performance indicators, which guide strategic planning and keep you ahead of the curve (example: sales pipeline) 
7. Lagging KPIs: These are past-looking performance indicators, which provide valuable insights for strategy refinement (example: YoY changes in X metric) 

In your pursuit of aligned strategy execution, it’s important to understand the crossover of these KPIs and how to use each type for your organization’s unique goals. 

While knowing what KPIs measure and track is useful, knowing why you need KPIs is the first step in creating and managing them more effectively. 

Here are the five key benefits of KPIs: 

1. Shared focus: KPIs concentrate on activities that drive shared strategic objectives, fostering a performance-oriented, collaborative culture 
2. Accountability: Clear KPIs foster ownership and engagement, as personal performance is directly linked to organizational success 
3. Decision precision: By regularly monitoring KPIs, businesses can identify trends, uncover potential issues, optimize performance with data-backed decisions 
4. Performance evaluation: KPIs’ measurability allows teams to evaluate operational effectiveness, congratulate achievements, and address shortcomings 
5. Continuous improvement: KPIs offer clear benchmarks for success, driving teams and individuals to meet or exceed these benchmarks. 

KPIs aren’t just numbers — they offer the clarity, motivation, and direction needed to achieve organizational goals. 

While KPIs are vital to any mature business operation, they have flaws. KPIs are usually implemented without context, prioritization, or knowledge of KPI use. This causes several KPI limitations, such as: 

• Data overload: Tracking too many KPIs may lead to a flood of data and information, possibly overshadowing strategic objectives and creating confusion 
• Misinterpretation: Most KPIs are quantifiable, but without proper context on data, they can mislead decision making 
• Resource intensive: Setting up, monitoring, and analyzing KPIs takes time, labor, and financial investment, as with most critical business functions 
• Limited scope: As KPIs often lens in on specific business areas, they don’t accurately depict dynamic interdependencies and holistic business performance  
• Rigidity: KPIs can be difficult to change or adapt once set, affecting adaptability 

KPIs are the means to an end for greater strategic performance, but they’re not the end all-be-all themselves. 

KPIs can be adapted to suit differing business needs. As such, they don’t necessarily have to replace new or existing goal-setting processes. 

For example, when paired with a more ambitious goal-setting process, KPIs are complementary. KPIs pair well with a strategy execution framework like objectives and key results (OKRs). OKRs can help you set collaborative stretch goals, while KPIs contribute to the data-driven portion of OKRs: key results. 

By combining OKR goals with data-driven KPI measurements, organizations can boost accountability, performance, and ensure effective strategy execution.  

KPIs are the inside look at your organization’s performance. When used correctly, they promote alignment to strategic goals, informed decision-making, and an iterative approach to business operations. In our current business environment, however, simply having KPIs is not enough — a comprehensive understanding of which KPIs are important and why is the path to true impact. 

OKRs apply greater strategic context to KPIs, eliminating the risk of siloed metrics. By connecting your KPIs to quantifiable, aligned outcomes, OKRs are the next evolution of your KPI strategy. 

To learn more about KPIs in the context of OKRs, check out our OKRs vs. KPIs article. 

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