Every discipline in marketing has core KPIs that need to be monitored. From impressions and conversion rates to customer acquisition costs, it all adds up to influence how you form your strategy, campaigns, and even your teams.
What is often missing from these views are creative production metrics: the measurement of production steps and tasks it takes to produce creative assets of any medium for a business project.
This is largely due to the fact that producing materials is more like a fire hose of demands that creative teams are always trying to keep up with. It’s tough to track how day-to-day tasks impact your project’s and team’s bottom line when it’s raining revisions and changing priorities.
Creative production should be measured just as closely as your core marketing metrics, especially considering the costs involved - people, materials, and especially opportunity costs.
By regularly monitoring metrics for creative production, marketing leaders can identify bottlenecks, ensure alignment between projected timelines and actual outputs, and make informed decisions about resource allocation. This data-driven approach ensures that creative teams are better equipped to manage the overwhelming backlog of projects and avoid burnout.
Based on discussions with our customers, in both the agency and brand setting, and input from our own creative team, we've identified the three key metrics that every creative professional (and creative project manager) should have on demand, in real-time: production turnaround time, the total volume of project versions, and process management costs
Projected production timelines and actual creative production timelines can be two wildly different things. You may know, on average, how long it takes your team to complete certain types of projects, but within that, you should be tracking:
Primarily, production timelines dictate your team’s overall capacity at any given time. It helps you identify the why of process bottlenecks rather than just identifying where they happen. With this knowledge, you can:
However, there’s another important aspect to turnaround time that shouldn’t be overlooked, and that’s whether or not the complexity of the tools used, or the processes followed, have caused turnaround times to drag. Sifting through emails for feedback is one culprit, hard-to-use or feature incomplete proofing tools is another.
Your enterprise-ready online proofing system should be able to identify the project start and approval time spans for content types, or at least provide that data for extraction. In the absence of a centralized review and approval system, you can combine data points such as:
Tracking how the average turnaround time for actionable tasks and the frequency of missed deadlines fluctuates over time is critical to understanding your team's capacity.
Pulling these metrics manually can be a full-time job in and of itself. Instead, a capable online proofing system can automate this analysis by tracking project progress with notifications, access controls, and engagement rates with content proofs and comments.
Measuring project completion timelines may track your project velocity, but the number of versions within those timelines quickly show where bottlenecks live. This includes:
Looking at project revisions across a variety of dimensions (comparing teams, clients, end-result media form, etc.) can give you another key insight into capacity planning. Tracking revision effort helps to determine:
Getting project drafts right to hinge on the abilities of your creative team in some regard, but it’s also a broader reflection of how effective feedback can be given, understood, and implemented at every stage of the creation and revision process. It helps you identify if and where quality needs to be baked into the creative process earlier and faster.
Measuring the number of project revisions goes beyond just adding up all the different named versions of project files. It’s really a post-mortem project measure of total revision effort, including:
Attempting to measure project revisions by tallying up email communication and file shares is basically a wild goose chase: you’ll usually end up discovering that feedback was often provided against superseded versions, or that someone worked on a file on a local drive to make changes that weren’t shared with the group or factored into the revision timeline.
This can be overcome with an online proofing system that offers robust version management and embedded markups and comments, so you’re not having to hunt down all the ways revisions are communicated and implemented.
Measuring version creation with online proofing can help expose the most feedback-intensive projects or periods for your team.
Beyond production timelines and revision volume, the cost of managing the creative process is also ripe for improvement. The time put into the manual steps of managing a creative project to completion goes beyond headcount and salaries and can be less straightforward to assess. It includes the full lifecycle of the project, including:
It’s simple: Any time wasted, administrative or otherwise, is money wasted. Creative project management is a delicate balance between high-value work like setting and maintaining priorities and ensuring smooth communication and basic tasks that come out of those needs, like scheduling, file sharing, and deadline setting.
By tracking the full-scale of this work, project management teams can:
Project oversight is a bit harder to quantify in numbers, but the time sinks are clearly visible to those who are hands-on in ensuring projects move along a set path. Start by reviewing:
Many of the extraneous project management time costs can be solved with a centralized proofing and review system that cuts down on the back and forth facilitation of communication, review, and revisions. Consider where these time costs live and how consolidated technology can ease the routine tasks your project management encounters across project types and clients.
Understand the true health of your review processes with a comprehensive metrics dashboard.
Determining the average numbers for each of these creative marketing metrics depends on the type of organization and team size. How your team stacks up is less about industry averages and more about establishing a historical baseline of output and the right measures of progress for your specific team.
The key is to implement a system that can track and identify areas for improvement without requiring your team to stop the high-value work they’re already doing to gather those analytics.
See how Ziflow delivers creative production metrics around content review and approval efficiency.