The scorecard for your marketing efforts should contain the 5-10 most important metrics that are essential for understanding whether you are succeeding or failing. Once your scorecard has been created and refined, you should be able to look at it and immediately understand how things are going at a deep level.

Focus your scorecard using the “desert island test.” If you were on a desert island without phone or email, and only had one piece of paper with metrics tracked weekly, what would you want those numbers to be?

The scorecard itself has four parts:

• Metric Description. List the metric, making sure it is specific and numerically measurable.
• Who is Accountable. Name the one person who is responsible for the metric’s success. While many people can contribute to a goal, only one person can be ultimately accountable for wins and losses. Where two people are accountable, no one is.
• Weekly Goal. This is the target you are shooting for each week, and can be adjusted upward if performance improvements if needed.
• Weekly Results. In a real scorecard we would typically put the date as the header for each column. As an extra touch, these cells can be conditionally formatted to change colors based on whether the value is above or below the goal. In the example scorecard below, cells with orange values are off track and cells with blue values are on track.

Sean Henri advises “Optionally, you may want to strengthen your scorecard by adding some context and a story to your data. You can do this by incorporating the following elements:

• % towards goal
• % change over previous period
• Observations on what worked and what didn’t