What does marketing success look like? It’s a simple (yet important) question with an answer that’s often more complex than you’d think.

Although goal-setting is a standard step in building any marketing strategy or campaign, the goals teams tend to focus on are frequently vague and lack specific key performance indicators (KPIs) that are properly documented, benchmarked and tracked.

As the saying goes, if you don’t measure it, you can’t improve it.

To help make sure you’re measuring the right metrics to properly judge the success for your user-generated content (UGC) strategies and campaigns, we’ve built the Marketing KPI Matrix.

First, there are two standard types of metrics marketers should understand and always be tracking: production metrics and performance metrics.

Content Production Metrics

Production metrics help monitor ongoing processes, costs and productivity. While you might not always have targeted goals around improving your overall productivity and efficiency, these are critical KPIs to continually track over time.

Content production KPIs include metrics like:

Content Performance Metrics

Performance metrics are typically more closely tied to the specific goal, piece of content or the distribution channels you’re leveraging in your campaign or overall strategy. Where teams often get tripped up is that they tend to set broad goals — like to grow awareness or increase engagement — but then fail to actively track relevant hard metrics that would show progress towards that goal.

Performance KPIs include metrics like:

Visual UGC's Marketing KPI Matrix

To help Visual UGC customers more quickly and easily identify which ongoing and campaign-specific KPIs they should be tracking to measure the success of their user-generated content strategies, we’ve built this Marketing KPI Matrix.

The Content Production section lays out the productivity metrics you should be tracking on an ongoing basis. These broader and Visual UGC-specific content production metrics will best demonstrate the value of user-generated content to both your short and long-term marketing goals.

The Content Performance grid below provides guidance around which performance-based metrics you should be tracking depending on your overarching goals and which distribution channels you’re leveraging. The green Visual UGC Enable section below each goal row will help indicate the various Visual UGC features, plugins and tools you’ll need to use to begin working towards the goal above.

Confused about any of the metrics featured in KPI matrix? We’ve also included a glossary below explaining what every term means and how it’s calculated.

Next Steps