Miss our talk at MarketingProfs’ B2B Forum on how to improve your dashboards and reporting? Watch the full video now!

A KPI is a number for which you get a bonus, or you get fired.

That’s the strongest definition of a KPI we can offer, and it brings instant clarity to a discussion about what metrics are KPIs and what belongs in your reporting, your analytics, your dashboards. At recent conferences and events, I’ve talked with dozens of marketers who are struggling to put together concise reports that drive meaningful action, and when they think about what metrics will be on their next performance review, they realize almost everything they’re reporting on are metrics, not KPIs.

Even more jarring, a few realized their performance reviews have no KPIs on them at all. Their sole measure of success is showing up and clocking in.

If you strive for a career that makes a difference, a company that matters, and a work life of purpose and meaning, apply the same test to your days. What things do you measure that have real consequences, that will make or break the impact you deliver?

If you’re in a situation at work now where you have no KPIs, build some, even if you only hold yourself accountable to them. As long as you focus on them, you won’t have to wait long before others notice that you’re punching far above your weight.

So, what are your KPIs?

This week’s Bright Idea is our full presentation at the MarketingProfs B2B Forum. We’re sharing strategies and tactics for effective dashboards and reporting. The full session video, an MP3 for your enjoyment on the go, a transcript, and two sample dashboards for Google Data Studio that you can copy are all included. Get it now!

Learn effective dashboard practices now »

In the rear view this week, let’s look at a fun, shallow dive into SEO. By shallow, we’re demonstrating an example of the kind of work you’ll want to do a deep dive for yourself. Decaying links is a term in SEO which means a link to your website has gone bad; the link no longer works.

Why does this matter? Decaying links are an opportunity for you in two ways:

First, if a link to your website goes bad, you’ll want to reach out to the website, blogger, influencer, or news outlet that linked to you and let them know that either the link is wrong, or ask them to put the link back if appropriate.
Second, if a link to a competitor’s website goes bad, that’s an opportunity for you to reach out and say, “Hey, we noticed you linked to X in the past – would you be interested in creating some content together that might be of more value to you?”

So, taking a very quick look at top-level industry data, we see:

Industry-wise, government-related links decay the fastest, with a 7.22% decay rate for links year-to-date. Agriculture and solar industry links decay the slowest, at 4.3% and 4.6% respectively. Volume-wise, arts and entertainment have the largest number of links, so even a middle-of-the-rad 5.96% decay rate still translates into hundreds of thousands of links going bad this year. If you are in that industry, there’s no shortage of opportunity to grow on your competitors’ link losses. Equally true, if you’re in that industry, you have your work cut out for you defending your links.

The key takeaway here is that we should all be checking our website’s links – and our competitors’ links – to find opportunities to protect what we have and capture share in our market. Use this data in your next internal SEO team meeting to show just how fast links decay!

Methodology statement: Trust Insights used the AHREFS SEO tool, combined with custom analysis, to extract keyword searches for top-level industries based on NAICS two-digit categories. No filtering or vectorization was performed, as this is merely a cursory analysis and example. The date of data extraction and processing is October 23, 2019; the time frame of the data sample is January 1, 2019 – October 23, 2019, restricted to links published in that time. There is a bias towards links published in the English language, as NAICS industry codes are in US English.

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