“Art for art’s sake” was once a popular motto in the art and literature worlds. Creators wanted to make beautiful and meaningful work; whether anyone saw or appreciated it was a secondary concern. 

In the marketing world, we’re also driven to create, but we have to be aware of our work’s cost and impact and our team’s productivity. Creative key performance indicators (KPIs) help us understand our performance, recognize our successes, and use our resources as effectively as possible. 

In this article, you’ll learn:

• How to measure the performance of your creative team
• What creative KPIs are
• Ten creative KPIs every creative team leader should know about

How Do You Measure Creative Performance?

Measuring creative performance is all about comparing costs to achievements and finding the information we need to optimize this relationship. Does creative work resolve the problems it sets out to solve? Does it help a brand attain its marketing goals? Just as important, do the results justify the cost? Even if a creative team performs well, could it do better with different incentives, goals and processes? 

To answer these questions, we need data and hard numbers. We need to zoom in on specific aspects of the creative team’s performance, make the measurements that matter and see how they respond over time to initiatives and novel creative work. That’s the role of creative KPIs. 

In this article, we’re focusing on creative team KPIs. To learn more about brand marketing metrics and KPIs, read 10 Brand Metrics to Evaluate Your Brand Marketing Strategy.

What Are Creative KPIs?

Creative team leaders are awash with data, but raw data isn’t helpful. You can slice and dice it a million different ways, but most of it is irrelevant to your team’s performance. KPIs are the metrics and calculations that do matter, the ones that help you to figure out how your creative team is performing, the value of their contributions and the health of creative projects.

10 Creative KPIs You Should Be Focused On

Every creative team is unique, and every creative team leader has particular priorities. However, we’ll look at ten KPIs a creative team leader should focus on to understand the team’s performance. 

1. Project Cost

How much do you spend per project? This is perhaps the most important metric because it provides context for other KPIs. For example, you may have excellent client satisfaction rates, but your business won’t last long if you overspend to achieve positive outcomes. Additionally, measuring project costs over time helps creative leaders understand the impact of process changes on productivity and efficiency. 

To measure project cost, consider all spending associated with a project, including:

• Personnel costs
• Material costs
• Software costs
• The cost of outside contractors and vendors

It’s often helpful to quantify your team’s time into hourly increments and then measure how many hours each team member spends per project per month. 

2. Project Profit

Put simply, how much are you bringing in relative to how much you spend on each project? It goes without saying that you cannot sustain a situation in which costs outstrip revenues over the long term. If your team spends more than it makes, you may want to reconsider processes, tools, staffing and the promises you make to clients. 

3. Time Spent on Rework

How much time does your team spend redoing work, either because clients are unhappy or because you don’t have processes to prevent duplication? Rework is part and parcel of creative work—client feedback often means you’ll have to make tweaks and modifications. But if your team spends too much time on rework, efficiency hits the floor, costs increase and you fail to make the most of your resources. 

Common causes of rework include:

• Poor communication with clients and between team members
• Inadequate use of software resources such as brand design templates and creative automation tools
• Failure to adhere to brand standards and design guidelines
• Undertrained team members

4. Project Time Estimate Accuracy

How accurate are your project time estimates? The popular cliché says you should figure out how long a project will take and then double it. In reality, team leaders are often under pressure to deliver with short lead times. However, if you consistently underestimate and overpromise, the result will be dissatisfied clients, burned-out team members and poor performance.

To determine the accuracy of your project time estimates, look at how long you say a project will take versus how long it actually takes. Once you understand the relationship between these metrics, you can focus on providing more accurate estimates and improving the team’s efficiency. 

5. Work vs. Capacity

Is your team achieving its expected capacity? This KPI compares what you expect your team to achieve with its actual achievements. One way to measure this is to track the number of hours the team logs compared to their available time. This KPI is useful for several reasons:

• It helps team leaders deploy their resources efficiently. Ideally, your team should achieve 80% or more of its available capacity.
• It informs planning and lead-time calculations.
• It can help you understand why project time estimates are inaccurate.
• It may indicate that your team needs more or fewer resources.

6. Lead Time per Project

Lead time measures how long your team takes to deliver on a project. Creative team leaders should measure how many hours or days their team takes to complete a wide variety of content and design projects. Use that information to inform capacity and project time estimates. 

Lead times measurements are also helpful for tracking the impact of efficiency measures; increased efficiency should result in reduced lead times (or higher capacities).

7. Client Satisfaction

Are your clients happy with your team’s work and lead times? It doesn’t matter how efficient and productive you are if the work fails to meet client expectations. Client satisfaction is an overarching KPI that can give you insight into a  potential problem with your team and is typically measured post-project with surveys.  

However, it doesn’t tell you what is wrong (or right) and why. It’s most valuable when used alongside the other KPIs we’ve discussed, which will help you diagnose issues revealed by client satisfaction metrics. 

8. Software Utilization Rates

For our final three, we’ll look at creative KPIs that highlight the impact of thoughtfully designed software on creative team efficiency and productivity. 

Is your creative team using the software tools available to them? Creative software for designers and writers can streamline workflows and increase productivity, including content management systems, content design templates, web and print distribution systems, creative automation platforms, and creative team management software. But they can only achieve their potential if your team takes full advantage of their features. 

If creative team leaders don’t measure software utilization rates, they may not see the full efficiency and productivity gains that software can provide. Once you understand utilization rates, you can begin to assess the reason for low utilization. Perhaps your teams aren’t aware of the software’s benefits. Or perhaps they are insufficiently trained. 

Improving the software onboarding and training process can also move the needle on other KPIs you care about, including project cost, time spent on rework and project lead times. 

9. Content Freshness

Content freshness is one of the biggest challenges faced by creative marketing teams. As brands evolve, their content requirements change, and older content can quickly become outdated. Content freshness plays a vital role in brand consistency, but monitoring content freshness and resolving freshness issues is often difficult, particularly for large branding projects.

Alongside its many other features, Marq Analytics helps creative teams to discover content that needs to be refreshed.

10. Template Adoption

Design templates can be a huge timesaver, helping teams quickly deploy consistent content that meets brand design standards. Sophisticated smart templates can automate content creation workflows and substantially reduce brand asset lead times. 

However, creative team leaders should monitor template adoption usage and ensure that their team makes the most of templating features. 

Use Creative KPIs to Track and Improve Creative Team Performance

We’ve explored ten creative KPIs that empower creative team leaders to measure their team’s performance, discover optimization opportunities and track productivity improvements over time. As management consultant Peter Drucker once said, “You can’t improve what you don’t measure,” so your next step is implementing KPI tracking for your creative team. 

Marq is here to help. Our new Marq Analytics tools can help track the creative KPIs you care about most, including template adoption, content freshness, content approval statuses and much more. Marq Analytics works alongside a comprehensive range of design templates, creative automation and content design features that empower creative teams to streamline and automate creative workflows. 

Schedule a 1:1 with our team to learn how Marq will positively impact the creative KPIs that matter most to your business.