A good question about using KPIs in multi-site companies …
I’ve had a question similar to the following a number of times since I published The Big Book of Key Performance Indicators:
“I just finished reading your book (great book!), and I am thinking about implementing KPIs for my company. I work for a multi-media company that has over 60 different brands, and my first question would be: should I approach implementing the KPIs on an individual brand-to-brand basis, or an overall umbrella approach?”
An excellent question.
The strategy I nearly always recommend in this situation is to build a core set of KPIs that can be tracked across all sites and then augment these core KPIs with site or business-specific indicators as necessary. Doing so gives you great visibility across all properties and the ability to compare cross-site performance, essentially allowing senior management to identify top performers to use as a model for other sites as well as to establish meaningful benchmarks.
You do want to augment the cross-site KPIs on a site-by-site basis to reflect the fact that some properties are more sophisticated than others and are more likely to benefit from more tactical KPIs than others. An advantage of this strategy is that those sites who need more analytics support can get it internally — learning from their peers, as it were.
