Bear Essentials: Your KPIs Are Measuring Activity, Not Impact
Perception
You feel good about your measurement plan … dashboards are full, reports get emailed out on a regular cadence. There are lots of charts, lots of numbers, lots of “engagement.”
Reality
You’re measuring the busyness of your team, not the effectiveness of your strategy.
Views don’t mean value, and volume isn’t proof of anything. Your metrics aren’t telling a story; they’re not even telling you what you accomplished.
Teams have to stop hiding behind vanity metrics (page views, email opens, likes, etc.) and start measuring what changed (CLV, CAC, conversion rate, etc.) because of your content.
Why It Matters
- Leadership sees (maybe) the effort but not the effect.
- Content and creative teams burn out trying to hit output goals, and content becomes more and more homogenous.
- By default, the content and marketing strategy becomes “do more” instead of “do better.”
What Most Teams Get Wrong
- Counting pages/views instead of changes and progress towards goals.
- Linking content activity to marketing operations/activity instead of or as well as revenue impact or influence.
- Not reviewing metrics (at least quarterly) to assess and re-align where needed.
What to Do Instead
- Define 1–2 outcome metrics: e.g., “time to decision,” “asset reuse rate.”
- Work with impacted teams (sales, events, brands, etc.) to understand what success looks like and build a measurement plan together.
- Map content to metrics based on goals and desired changes (not just views).
- Report impact stories – how the content/campaign/… helped the target audience – not just the numbers.
Seventh Bear Take
If you’re just measuring how many pieces you publish instead of what changed because of them, you’re measuring the wrong thing.
Don’t brag about how much you wrote … talk about what changed because you wrote.
Deeper Dive
Want more on this topic? Check out: Brand Strategy’s Number One Metric: ‘Good Things’
