Metrics is a quantifiable measure used to track and assess the status, performance, or outcomes of a specific process, activity, or objective. Metrics provide valuable data and insights, helping organizations, teams, or individuals evaluate progress toward goals, identify trends, make data-driven decisions, and improve performance over time.
Examples of metrics include sales revenue, customer satisfaction scores, average response time, and number of calls made.
We have just released a new update to our Metric form that will make using metrics easier and bring more cohesion to all the data in your account. You can watch this short clip on the new form and how to use it, or keep reading for the step-by-step of the latest features!
The first thing to know is that the metric interface will look a little different, but creating a new metric is still a breeze. Similar to the old way of setting up a metric, you will go to Settings -> Metric and hit the + New Metric button to get started.
We've made the new forms bigger and with more information so you understand what metric you're selecting. You can also add metrics to "Favorites" if it is a metric you use often. We also added visibility into where the metric is being used, who created it, and more.
We also have a handful of helpful, supportive features for when you’re creating and organizing your metrics, like tags, a usage count, and a summary of the reports matching the metric settings you’re dealing with.
Where is it?
The form is under Manage - Metrics and the picker is in all forms. You can select a metric using:
widgets
mobile widgets
slides
competitions
competitions – points metrics
scorecard metrics
activity flow stages
battles
How does the Metric formula work?
We've updated the interface for creating and editing Metrics to extend support for adding formulas and formatting. By leveraging the metric formula, you gain greater visibility, reporting, and customization to other areas of the platform.
For example - instead of creating an Achievement for Largest Average Deal Size that requires you to set up that average calculation on the achievement itself, you can create a metric that measures the average deal size that you can pull into any achievement, competition, slide, or dashboard widget.
Let's walk through how to build a new metric using the formula:
Step One: Data
Determine what data you want to measure and choose its corresponding activity type.
Give your metric a descriptive name and description
Add tags to your metrics so you can easily search and filter for them
Step Two: Formula
This step is new and has replaced all the “function” steps in other create forms like “Widgets”, “Slides”, “Competitions”, etc.
It's the formula that decides how the metric should calculate the results.
Moving forward, all metrics need a formula to work.
Formulas explained:
Sum
This sums up the value based on the field you select in “Measured in.” This is similar to when you selected “Value” as a function when creating a widget.
You can select among all the value fields from the selected “Activity Type”
Average
This takes the sum of the “Measured in” field you select and divides it by number of reports (this is not the same as sum of quantity as before)
This differs from the "average" function used in widgets, competitions, etc.
For example:
This is how average work before: Sum(Value)/Sum(Quantity)
This is how average works with formulas: Sum(Value)/Count(the number of reports/rows in the reports table)
Division
This is fairly straightforward: you select what value you want to summarize and what you want to divide with.
Typical use case examples:
Average deal size: value/quantity
Average call duration: call time/quantity
Custom formula
This is only available for Pro and Enterprise plans. There are many use cases for it, in general you can use different functions that are similar to Excel. To list some:
Highest sale
You will select Max(value) to create a metric that shows the highest sales
Call duration
Since we need duration to be in seconds to display it correctly, if you have data in number of minutes called you can use a custom formula to multiply the value with 60 to get to seconds.
Step Three: Formatting
This step is about how you want the Metric result to be formatted. Previously, we did not support any customized formatting, so this is a nice update that allows you to see your metric formatted in a way that makes sense to what you are measuring.
Wherever the Metric is used, we will display the results according to the formatting defined in this step
We support four different formatting types:
Number
This is the default format for numbers. You can decide if you want to use decimals and suffixes.
The “Shorten” function reduces the number of characters displayed. This is recommended if the numbers are above 1 million.
Currency
If the metric is tracking revenue, you can define the currency type by adding in a prefix, for example, $1000
Percentage
This adds a “%” after the value, it is very similar to adding a Suffix
100 → 100%
Time
This converts the number of seconds into a readable time format in seconds, for example, 125 → 2 minutes, 5 seconds.
This format can only be used with seconds as the measurement - if your data is measured in minutes, hours, or days, then we suggest using custom formulas.
This formatting lets you now visualize time on all the layouts we have on widgets, slides, etc.
The data filtering options haven't changed and depend on the activity type settings. To help give an indication of what the filter you are creating actually concerns, we’re introducing a report summary:
This summarizes the reports for the last 30 days based on the filter you set in the form. Click Open Reports to see the actual reports in a new tab.
What is a tag?
We know that it can be hard to organize things when you have a high number of metrics in an account. Tags are meant to help simplify that. Use them to identify a purpose or supplemental information about a metric, like info about integrations that add data for this metric, which role uses it, or anything else you can think of that might be relevant to your setup.