KPIs vs Metrics | The Difference Maker | Analytics Simplified

Recently, I got a chance to meet some new folks of digital analytics and no wonder, they all looked lost and bewildered.They had a whole lot of doubts but the very basic and important one was the difference between KPIs and metrics. So, I have tried to ease down the things and after going through this blog, you would be able to get the crux of KPIs and metrics and would be able to understand why do both these matter for your business.

KPIs - What it is?

A KPI, as the name suggests, is a key performance indicator of your business. It helps you in understanding how well you are moving towards acheiving your business objectives.

For example: If you are running a blog, your business objective would be to increase the reach and the user engagement. You would want more visitors to come to your site and to spend more time reading your content, adding comments and sharing the blog hence, following could be your KPIs for

• Reach
• Total Visits/Sessions
• Total Number of Visitors
• Visitor Recency
• Campaign Effectiveness
• Engagement
• Total Number of Comments
• Total Subscribers
• Total Shares

By now, you must have started thinking if all these are KPIs then what the metrics are meant for? Right? No worries, here it is:

Metric, in easiest terms, is anything which you measure on your website. Be it the visits or the visitors, the time spent, shares, comments everything.

In other words, Metrics helps in quantifying the activities or events happening on your website. So metrics for a blog could be

• Reach
• Total Visits/Sessions
• Total Number of Visitors
• Visitor Recency
• Entries
• Bounce Rate
• Campaign Effectiveness
• Engagement
• Avg Time Spent
• Exit Rate
• Total Comments
• Total Subscribers
• Total Shares

Difference between KPIs & Metrics

If you would have noticed, you must have found that there are some common pointers, in both the list of KPIs and Metrics. For Instance: Total Visits, Visitors, Campaign effectiveness, Total Comments and shares etc. Why is that?? What's the difference between the two then?

If you are familiar with the set theory then it is safe to think metrics as the Super set and the KPIs be the subset of it. In other words, the metrics are everything which you would want to know related to your website's performance while the KPIs are the key things which are directly linked to your business objective and have direct impacts on the same. 

Metrics vs KPIs

Conclusion

For any business to run successfully, it is essential to keep a consistent eye at its performance. Hence, metrics and KPIs are the parameters through which you can achieve the same but one should be very careful while deciding the KPIs as they would be impacting the business directly. A business decision taken on the incorrect parameters can be worse than the decision with no data, so be careful!!