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These attractive dashboards give a reader-friendly overview of your company's objectives.
Small business owners often struggle to track their companies’ key performance indicators (KPIs) because of their packed schedules and limited time to dig into the right tools or reports. However, companies that monitor KPIs are much more likely to achieve profitable growth. Understanding how your business is performing — in terms of employee productivity, financial results or quarterly goals — is essential to knowing why your company is (or isn’t) meeting its growth targets. Managers must take the time to review the key metrics that matter most to their operations.
We’ll highlight 14 excellent tools that can help you monitor crucial KPIs, as well as explain why measuring this data is essential.
The following apps, solutions and platforms can help you track progress toward business goals, solve internal problems, improve productivity and monitor overall business health.
Geckoboard is a live KPI-tracking solution with a drag-and-drop interface that lets businesses design their own visual dashboards for a range of metrics. It’s designed for fast-moving teams that struggle to focus on essential business segments, and it integrates with popular platforms such as Google Analytics, Salesforce and Shopify. Geckoboard pulls data directly from synced programs to create clear, engaging visualizations of key metrics, and it’s simple to set up and use.
Salesforce’s customizable customer relationship management (CRM) software offers a range of features, third-party integrations and add-on options, making it ideal for growing businesses with diverse needs. Like many of the best CRM software platforms, Salesforce can help your business track KPIs via a central, organized hub for customer data, sales pipeline management, reporting and more.
As we discuss in our detailed Salesforce CRM review, this tool takes some time and tech know-how to set up. However, the result is a seamless platform that accommodates custom processes and can evolve with a company’s changing needs.
Grow is a business intelligence (BI) dashboard and reporting platform that aims to (as the name suggests) help businesses grow faster. Its features include data integration from various sources, customizable charts, and pre-built metrics for instant BI dashboard creation. Grow provides unique insights by blending, mashing and comparing data from multiple sources.
Although it’s designed for retail and e-commerce companies, Tableau has excellent features and templates that can be valuable for businesses of all kinds. Its real-time data tools connect directly to platforms like Salesforce and Excel, pulling information from different sources into one place. Tableau’s templates and dashboards make it easy to track performance, spot trends and make timely decisions based on what the data is telling you.
Olation helps businesses organize and connect data across different systems. It simplifies how information is structured and shared, which makes it easier to work with complex data behind the scenes. With full API access and support for advanced calculations, Olation can cut down on development time and reduce the need for custom coding.
It also works with tools you already know, like Excel, so it’s easy to track marketing results, forecast budgets and analyze performance. For larger teams, Olation can also improve reporting, collaboration and overall productivity.
SimpleKPI is a user-friendly tool that helps businesses track essential metrics. Despite its simplicity, it can handle a wide range of KPIs — including finance, marketing, operations and service metrics — and is suitable for any industry. SimpleKPI integrates with popular software and offers 24/7 customer support, along with a full-screen mode to display KPIs in real time.
Scoro is a KPI platform that helps businesses monitor every aspect of their performance in real time, all from a single dashboard. It integrates with other business software, offers customizable dashboards with unlimited widgets, and provides a centralized solution for managing work, tracking finances, planning projects and compiling reports. Scoro also includes tools to improve workplace collaboration, boost project profitability and automate routine tasks.
Asana is a project management solution that includes project-based KPI tracking tools. It uses a card system that lets users create tasks, set objectives and due dates, and assign team members responsible for completing each item. Asana’s KPI tracking system supports objectives and key results to help administrators match tasks to broader goals. The dashboard provides a tactical overview to help you monitor progress across individual projects.
Google’s Looker Studio is a free, user-friendly data visualization tool that turns raw business data into customizable, interactive dashboards. It connects with popular platforms — like Google Analytics, Sheets and BigQuery — to help businesses monitor KPIs across marketing, sales and operations. Teams can collaborate in real time, and the intuitive drag-and-drop interface makes it easy to create clear, shareable reports.
IDoneThis offers easy onboarding and a minimalist design that make it simple for teams to get started. Users can log goals, completed tasks, and blockers, as well as manage their progress through familiar communication tools such as email and Slack for workplace communication. Daily progress updates are delivered via automated emails, and the platform provides both high-level and individual productivity tracking to help teams stay on target and work more efficiently.
Moz Pro is an all-in-one search engine optimization (SEO) tool set that helps businesses improve their website’s search visibility. It allows users to conduct site audits to identify technical SEO issues and get recommendations for fixes. Moz Pro also supports SEO strategy development, keyword tracking across more than 170 search engines, backlink analysis and keyword research, including difficulty scores, competitor insights and search engine results page analysis.
Splash is a platform that helps businesses create, manage and execute events that build brand visibility and drive growth. It offers customizable templates to showcase your brand, along with intuitive tools, simple integrations and compliance controls that make it easy for any team member to run a successful events program.
Splash helps businesses engage their audiences consistently and professionally to build trust and customer loyalty. Through seamless integrations and in-depth data analytics and reporting, Splash supports smarter event programming, better audience engagement, and more effective tracking of pipeline and revenue impact.
HubSpot is an all-in-one CRM platform that offers software, integrations and resources to connect marketing, sales, content management and customer service. The platform’s value lies in the integration of its individual products. The Marketing Hub helps generate leads, automate marketing and analyze results, while the Sales Hub provides CRM tools that offer deeper insights, automate tasks and speed up deal closures.
Thanks to their versatility and wide range of features, spreadsheets remain a valuable tool for businesses. Far beyond basic data entry, the best spreadsheet software supports tasks such as data filtering and visualization, custom formatting, accounting, analytics, project management and presentations. Spreadsheets help businesses store, organize and analyze information. They also enable companies to model growth or simulate different outcomes using variable inputs. Popular spreadsheet tools include Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets, Zoho Sheet and Apple Numbers.
>> Learn More: The 5 Most Important KPIs for Warehouses
Here are a few reasons why setting and tracking KPIs is essential for business growth.
By setting and tracking KPIs, you can measure your performance against your goals, identify areas for improvement, and make strategic decisions to move your business forward.
“KPIs provide valuable insights that help inform decisions, allowing businesses to make more informed choices about how best to achieve their desired outcomes,” explained Tomas Keenan, founder of Step It Up Academy. “Ultimately, having clearly defined KPIs in place helps businesses stay on track and remain competitive in the marketplace.”
Without clearly defined KPIs, it becomes difficult to measure progress or success, which, in turn, can lead to missed opportunities, reduced profits and decreased competitiveness.
A dashboard that combines different metrics gives you easy access to the information you need so you can spot problems or capitalize on new opportunities. For example, if you’re in a sales slump, tracking KPIs such as the number of calls made, appointments kept, or trade events attended can help you figure out what’s wrong and adjust your strategy. By monitoring these KPIs regularly, you can find the most effective path to boost sales and keep customers engaged on your website.
“Alternatively, suppose you have a fantastic concept for a new product,” said Brad Anderson, founder of Fruition. “Before launching it on a large scale, you may test it with a few clients and use KPIs to validate your business model. You may track the number of interested customers, the cost to support the new product, the net promoter score, the implementation time, the number of defects, etc.”
KPIs are like a company’s scorecard. Monitoring your vital indicators requires only a few key metrics. To drive results, focus on measuring what truly needs to change.
“I have discovered that it is essential to measure a few metrics for each of the four categories: employees, customers, processes and revenue,” said Sean Stevens, director at Immerse Education. “These are disciplines associated with human resources, customer satisfaction, business processes and business strategy. First, ensure that you select the appropriate KPIs for your business; then determine who will be held accountable for them.”
Ryan Faber, CEO of Copymatic, noted that creating and tracking KPIs can help employees take greater responsibility for their work and results. “When employees are given clear, measurable goals to work toward, they can take ownership of their work and feel a sense of accountability for their performance,” Faber said.
Some interviews were conducted for a previous version of this article.