A practical checklist for defining success metrics

Teams tend to reach for this after something has already gone wrong. Run through this the next time defining success metrics comes up.

Strategy work is mostly deciding what not to do, and writing it down so it stays decided. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

The checklist

• Agree the numbers before the work starts
• Traffic is not a business outcome
• Pick metrics you can actually influence
• Someone is named as the owner
• There is a date to review it again

What is actually at stake

Agree the numbers before the work starts. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

The short version

Clear scope protects the client at least as much as it protects the agency. Three things worth confirming about defining success metrics before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Traffic is not a business outcome — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Pick the one that would hurt most if it failed, and start there.