Analytics vs. KPIs: What's the Difference? [Ask the Expert] (2024)

What are the differences between KPIs and analytics?

KPIs are performance metrics that tell you if organizational goals are being met, while other analytics might tell you what’s driving that performance.

For example, perhaps the trend of scores on an onboarding pre-assessment is simply another analytics result, while the percentage of employees compliant with your security awareness course is a KPI. The only difference between these is the level of importance and meaning bestowed on the latter.

Typically, this importance on a particular metric is for good reason. Logic and experience inform stakeholders as to those results that best inform ongoing decisions to be made. For instance, an organization with a KPI around sales results is almost certainly basing forward guidance, personnel decisions, or training programs according to the ongoing, changing value of this indicator.

How do people misuse “analytics” when they really mean “KPIs”?

Einstein said, “not everything that can be counted counts.” There’s more to the quote, but that first part stands well on its own. If your team has 50 different KPIs, it’s arguable that none of them are actually differentiated as key indicators.

Rather, you just have a lot of analytics results, which may all have varied importance and meaning. But KPIs are intended to be uniquely significant and summarizing.

How can analytics and KPIs be used together?

KPIs are usually backed up by other analytics results. A number of secondary figures or details are necessary to explain the unexpected values or changes in a KPI.

For example, understanding a spike in sales results will likely require insight into a number of other metrics—including sales by product, sales by division, call volume, or staffing levels. Without these additional metrics, a KPI will quickly lose its meaning, as the value bounces around while being misunderstood.

What’s the difference between learning KPIs and business KPIs?

Learnings KPIs are a specialized category of KPIs. As such, they have the same conceptual grounding of all key performance indicators—namely that they are imbued with a certain level of importance and meaning.

But learning KPIs are a family of indicators specific to the learning domain. They will depend on what matters most to your organization. For instance, typical types of learning KPIs include things such as length of onboarding, time to competency, compliance rate, knowledge retention, skill levels, credentials, learning resource utilization, and learning pathways, among others.

How can you connect learning analytics with business KPIs?

The line between learning KPIs and business KPIs—which often indicates where learning should be having an impact on performance—can get blurry.

For example, an L&D team in charge of customer service training may decide that the CSAT scores of their learners is the most meaningful indicator of success for the programs they design. The learning materials and learning programs for the customer service reps will have a major impact on their performance, but other factors may influence them as well.

In this case, L&D must collaborate with customer service leadership to help drive success together. Thus, the connection between learning and business KPIs also represents an opportunity for connecting learning and business teams.

Want to create baselines for your own L&D programs?

In this real-world example, to create learning benchmarks.

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David Ells takes great pride in leading a dynamic team and turning innovative ideas into reality. His passion for technology and development found its roots at Rustici Software. During his tenure, he contributed significantly to the creation of SCORM Cloud, a groundbreaking product in the eLearning industry, and led the development of the world’s first learning record store powered by xAPI.