KPI for creative employees and why this indicator is important for business

Why is it so important to pay attention to KPIs? How does a quantitative performance indicator affect any business area? How does the KPI system work in practice and what should we know about it?

A Key Performance Indicator (KPI) is a quantitative indicator that allows for an objective assessment of the performance of a company as a whole, its structural units or individual employees. The KPI system is implemented to ensure transparent remuneration and to motivate and stimulate work activity. When it comes to production or sales processes, the application of this system is relatively clear. However, when we talk about creative professionals, such as journalists, several doubts and difficulties arise when trying to measure its effectiveness.

When it comes to business, however, when promoting a website through digital marketing, KPI is one of the most important indicators. This is because as soon as the promotion begins, marketers start implementing various technologies, including financial instruments (such as useful tools like online cryptocurrency exchanges, with which you can exchange BNB to SOL or buy cryptocurrencies, etc.). And the more options a company or brand's website offers, the higher the chances that KPIs will be higher.

What indicators can be used to evaluate the work of an editorial team?

The first thing that comes to mind is citations and views. However, if we think about it, neither of these indicators directly accounts for the quality of the content. To get a more objective view, it is important to add a few more evaluation criteria:

1. Direct traffic — an indicator that defines the degree of response of the target audience to the published product, when visitors access the site by directly typing the URL into the browser or clicking on a saved bookmark.
2. Reading Completion Rate — a parameter that shows how many users read the text to the end and where most readers stopped. This allows you to understand how interesting, useful, and easy to absorb the content is.
3. Virality — the ability of published material to spread quickly on social networks without the direct effort of its author, reflected in reader reactions such as likes, clicks, shares and comments.

Each of these indicators has its weight in the overall system. The most valuable are citation and direct traffic, followed by reading completion rate, and virality closes the chain of indicators.

How does the KPI system work in practice?

When an editor receives data on the newsroom’s performance, he or she has at his or her fingertips information about the strengths and weaknesses of the contributors, the most popular and important topics, the most read authors, and the most cited materials. He or she analyzes this information and tries to combine the skills of each journalist to make the right decisions, control the work, and achieve better results.

This analysis provides a clear understanding of what the editorial staffing policy should be. When hiring a new journalist, it is possible to set clear KPI targets that they should achieve in the first few months of their employment. For example, achieving a certain amount of traffic and citations in the first three months. This method works because the professional clearly understands the goals they need to achieve.

Discussing the KPI system, we cannot ignore its impact on the choice of topics. In practice, it often happens that content on important informational topics cannot attract as much traffic as an entertainment or scandalous article. This can be explained by the fact that part of the audience engages in aggregators, uses online services offered on business websites, such as Godex and others, or simply access entertainment channels without paying attention to more serious informative content. However, when the agenda is serious and addresses important and significant events in the country and the world, the indicators usually rise quickly.

It is extremely important to meet the demands of aggregators and focus on relevant topics. This will allow you to create materials that generate high traffic and consider the interests of your target audience. All of this data is an essential tool for achieving these goals.

KPI system development perspectives for creative companies and employees

Monitoring the quality of texts and managing them tactically is great. For companies, content quality control is crucial. However, productivity must be the basis of all processes. The editorial planning of many national media outlets, as it exists today, must evolve into a fundamentally different format, which allows for accurate predictions about which texts are most relevant at a given time, what users’ search queries are, and which titles will work best from a marketing perspective.