When you’re dehydrated, you won’t stop until you find water to quench your thirst. You’ll have that unwavering commitment to finding something to drink, even if you’re in the middle of a dessert.
And when you feel as strongly about a goal or a mission in life, you’ll have the same unshakable belief that you’ll find a way to accomplish it. Some call it your “why”, others say it’s your North Star.
In business, the North Star is usually the ultimate reason why people do what they do. What keeps them motivated even when it’s hard and what provides them with satisfaction when they’re performing well.
When talking about business, people try to express their North Star in metrics so they can measure their progress towards it more easily. That’s why we asked over 20 professionals about their North Star metric: do they have more than one? Which ones do they align their company priorities around?
You’ll find the answers quite inspirational, so let’s dive in.
What Is a North Star Metric?
Simply put, your North Star metric is the one that best reflects the value your customers are able to gain from your product or service. It also reflects your “why”, bringing together the company’s mission, vision, values, and guiding beliefs.
当你确定你的北极星度量,您可以create a strategy focused on helping it grow – that way, your whole business will grow, too. North Star metrics are typically connected to a company’s long-term goals, and all other goals set by individual teams have to be aligned with it.
One of the best-known North Star metrics is Facebook’s – the number of Daily Active Users. This way, Facebook can monitor how many people are being active on the platform and gain valuable feedback on how they perceive the platform.
However, it’s critical to remember that your North Star metric isn’t the goal itself – it’s a相关，可衡量的指标and growth that helps the whole company align its efforts to achieve one common goal.
The Benefits of Defining a North Star Metric
Why do companies even focus on identifying their North Star metric?
Here are the main benefits of defining it:
- Staying on track.It helps you determine whether you’re on the right track at any given moment. Whether you’re creating a strategy or evaluating your performance, you can assess all your other metrics and goals based on your North Star, and take actionable steps to ensure your priorities are aligned.
- Better focus.Clearly defined North Star metrics give you laser-sharp focus on your goals. Based on your key KPI, you will identify your lower-level metrics that will be assigned other teams and individuals so everyone within the company can do their part to contribute to your North Star.
- Assessing customer value.您可以轻松衡量和评估客户价值。这样做的最佳方法之一是衡量客户花费的时间与您的产品或服务互动。如果这个数字很高，您将知道您能够通过产品或服务来实现业务的真实价值。
- 收入指标。Finally, your North Star metric can indicate how much your revenue will grow. Note that you shouldn’t choose revenue as your North Star metric, since money is never the only or the most important motive driving a business forward, but there’s usually a relationship between revenue growth and increasing numbers of a North Star metric.
What is a Good North Star Metric?
Since the purpose of your North Star metric is to capture the value your product or service provides to your customer, as well as your brand’s mission and core values, it’s important to choose it carefully. Sometimes it may be challenging to identify the right追踪业务指标.
A good North Star metric has several aspects to focus on.
First of all, it’s the clear indicator of your growth. It’s not the number of likes on your Instagram page as it doesn’t say anything about how many purchases your followers make and how happy they are with the service. If your North Star metric grows, your business should be growing as well.
A good North Star should be somewhere close to the result you want your customers to experience after using your product or service. For example, the number of registered users on a platform doesn’t really say anything about the value of the platform since it’s only the beginning of the journey. However, the number of active users over a specific time range says much more about how valuable people find this platform.
您的北极星指标也应基于客户满意度。这样，它确实可以捕获您提供的价值。同时，该指标需要保持可衡量并受到特定时间范围的限制 - 通过这种方式，它与设定智能目标非常相似。在您的北极星指标的这两个方面之间找到平衡至关重要。
最后，由于您的北极星指标应该反映您的努力，并且只包括您的产品/服务和客户，因此请确保它不取决于外部因素，而仅取决于您为用户所做的事情。这意味着您的北极星指标是可行的，并且可以在事情进展顺利时进行策略和调整。
北极星指标的示例
仍然不确定您的北极星指标可能是什么？
Although it’s a common case, you don’t need to have only one. There are many companies that successfully juggle several North Star metrics that help them track their growth.
如果您想了解它们是什么，让我们继续介绍北极星指标20+专家同意与我们分享的示例。他们可能会激发您的灵感并帮助您定义自己的。
PRO TIP: How Are Users Engaging on My Site? Which Content Drives the Most Online Activity?
If you want to discover how visitors engage with your website, and which content drives the most engagement and conversions, there are several on-page events and metrics you can track from Google Analytics that will get you started:
- Sessions and % new sessions.How much traffic does your website receive on a daily or monthly basis?
- 频道会议。Which channels are driving the most traffic to your website?
- Average session duration.How long do visitors spend on your website on average?
- Pageviews and pageviews by page. Which pages on your website are viewed the most?
- 页面上的平均时间。What is the average time users spend on a specific webpage?
和更多…
Now you can benefit from the experience of our Google Analytics experts, who have put together aplug-and-play Databox templateshowing the most important KPIs for monitoring visitor engagement on your website. It’s simple to implement and start using as a standalone dashboard or in marketing reports, and best of all, it’s free!
您只需单击几下即可轻松设置它 - 无需编码。
要设置仪表板，请按照以下3个简单步骤：
步骤1：Get the template
第2步：将您的Google Analytics（分析）帐户与DataBox连接。beplay体育appios
Step 3:Watch your dashboard populate in seconds.
拥有北极星指标的公司
Almost half of the participants in our survey (47.6% of them) say that there’s only one North Star metric in their company. All other metrics are aligned with this one and each team works hard to make a contribution to this overall company goal.
这些北极星指标的一些例子是什么？让我们找出答案。
用户满意度
为了some companies, user satisfaction is the ultimate goal. It makes sense since it’s completely aligned with the definition of the North Star metric, and it can easily be measured in various ways – for example, by sending out customer surveys or monitoring social media.
That’s the case withPowder Insider, says Tim Anderson. “It’s not sales, it’s not leads or anything else, first and foremost, we are in the business of serving the user and making them as happy as possible. If we can get that right, everything else takes care of itself.”
Number of Closed Sales a Month
Closed sales equal success for some businesses.
“我们的北极星指标是'一个月销售的数量'，”葬礼资金.
“If the number of our closed sales a month increases, it will accelerate the growth of our business. It will ensure that our expenses are covered, and there we have a substantial return on our investment.”
Customer Growth
客户增长可以表明其他几个指标的增长。为了PEO Companies, according to Nelson Sherwin, “the most essential ones fall in line with customer growth although there are tons of other metrics we should be tracking.”
“Customer growth is absolutely vital for my business’s success and we wouldn’t be where we are today if we hadn’t prioritized it from the get-go. Increased customer growth means higher revenue, more engagement with our services, and improved word-of-mouth advertising,” concludes Sherwin.
Customer Lifetime Value
Customer lifetime value can be an excellent North Star metric, as it can drive a good deal of other metrics related to cash flow and your marketing efforts.
“As an agency founder, I’m obviously dealing with the same cash flow problems as any business, but it’s especially important to have predictable cash flow and margins for a services business,” explains Alex Birkett ofAlexbirkett.com, who considers this metric critical for a services business.
“但是，除了简单的P＆L之外，客户寿命价值实际上是另一个收购指标的很好的预测指标：推荐。客户与我们在一起的时间越长，他们向我们付款的越多，他们又向我们提到的客户越多。这是服务业务的最佳北极星，因为您不专注于最大程度地提高潜在客户或收购，而是您既要给客户的价值，又要从客户那里获得的价值。”
电子邮件订户数量
“I operate a niche website and for me, my true North Star metric is ‘Number of Email Subscribers’,” explains Rohan Kadam ofBiking Know How. Kadam underlines email marketing is where the largest portion of their revenue comes from.
“因为我在博客和内容营销business, it is very important to track my email subscribers. I use the email channel to promote new content on my website and also to promote affiliate offers. 85% of my total revenue comes from my email channels. My constant focus hence is to constantly ensure that my subscriber numbers keep increasing and my audience size is always in an uptrend.”
拥有多个北极星指标的公司
Our research showed that 52.4% of professionals have more than one North Star metric. We also asked them what metrics they typically align their company priorities around, and most answers were revenue (around 30%), customer growth (around 30%), and user experience (around 25%). These answers may reflect a logical string of events: the better the user experience you provide, the more customers you will acquire. The more customers you get, the more your revenue grows!
And here are the most commonly used sets of North Star metrics that the participants in our study use.
参与经济增长
Your engagement rate across different channels can be a good indicator of how valuable your product or service is to your customers.
Brittney Ihrig oftl, dvsays they track “any metric that measures engagement percentage, and this goes for any channel.”
“As we’re an early-stage startup, engagement is critical as we iron out the kinks and develop our product. To do this, we need a loyal and engaged community. Thus, social engagement is one of the best metrics to measure this. We find that Twitter especially is an underutilized medium, as many SaaS companies distribute their content regularly, without actively engaging the community,” says Ihrig.
Customer Satisfaction Rating
为了Andre Oentoro of牛奶，客户满意度等级是监控最重要的指标之一，因为这对他的公司如何看待他们确实很重要。
“How our customers rate our service is highly important to us. It helps us figure out what needs to be improved and what we can keep doing. Our main focus is on our customers, and when they’re not happy with our work, it can be a big problem.
收入增长
结合客户保留率（对于许多企业而言，这比获得新客户更具成本效益和重要），收入增长可以很好地表明您的现金流量。
“收入增长和客户保留推动了我们的业务。这两个主要确定我们的现金流，这是为我们的业务增添氧的氧气，并确定我们是否需要扩大资源。”Coalition Tech，并添加：
“Retention also serves as a scorecard for our operations and is ultimately the measure of how effectively we are generating revenue for our clients.”
Customer Growth
“客户增长率高度决定了我们业务的成功，” Alina Clark说Cocodoc.
“Just like a restaurant depends on feeding more mouths, a Saas company depends, sometimes almost entirely on the number of paid users on its platform. The customer growth metric determines how we do everything else. It shows us how to approach the customer experience, the marketing, and whether the sales funnel is as efficient as we want it to be,” explains Clark and adds that having a North Star metric can also give you a sense of purpose and help you focus on what you want to achieve in the future.
“We are looking to grow beyond being a startup. The key metrics show us what works, and what doesn’t. Besides, measuring the customer growth rates also takes into consideration the churn rates on our products. A high churn rate signifies the need to change something in our customer experience. As such, every attempt at tinkering with our business processes is inspired by insights collected through the customer growth KPIs.”
找到你的北极星
不管只有一个还是您定义了许多对您的业务和战略优先事项至关重要的指标，您的北极星在各种意义上都是引人注目的。
Aligning your strategy around your North Star will help you accelerate your growth, sharpen your focus by tracking the metrics that really matter, and work hard to provide an outstanding customer experience.
Think about your purpose, motivation, and goals – what kind of results do you want your customers to achieve by using your product or service? This will point you in the right direction when defining your North Star metrics, so you can align your company priorities around them and keep growing.
