When you set goals for yourself or for your business, it's good to think about how you will track whether you're making progress. In marketing, we do that by defining the key performance indicators or KPIs for your goal. By the end of this video, you'll know what KPIs are, how to define them for your goal, and you will know some of the most common marketing KPIs. So let's explore. Say it's your New Year's resolution to focus on your overall fitness and you set yourself the following goal. By the end of this year, I want to run the Honolulu Marathon in under 4 hours. That's a SMART goal. In other words, it specific, it's measurable. You know you want to run 26.2 miles in under four hours. It's achievable, if you train of course. It's relevant since it's a goal that relates to your plan to get very fit and it's time-bound. You have until December to get ready since that's when the Honolulu Marathon is scheduled. Say you plan to train for this using Strava, an app that helps you track your running progress. You have a plan and you gradually increase your mileage. Here's a report you get for one of your practice runs on Strava. It gives you the distance you ran, the time it took you, your pace. You also get some data on elevation gain and calories burned. All of this information is interesting, but the most important information here is pace. You see that you're running at a pace of 11 minutes and 49 seconds per mile. If you want to complete a marathon in under 4 hours, you'll need to run at approximately 9 minutes per mile, so you have a little bit of training to do. Pace is a key metric for you to track to assess whether you're making progress towards your goal. All the other data available is interesting and it's related to your goal, but not as crucial as pace when it comes to achieving your goal. In this case, you can call pace a key performance indicator or KPI. KPIs are measurable values that can help you track your progress towards your goal. KPIs are usually quantitative, meaning they can be measured. They are directional, they go up or down. And they have a direct relationship to your goal. For marketers, KPIs are an important tool to help identify the metrics that really matter and distinguish them from the data that are interesting. But that don't necessarily tell you whether or not you're achieving your goal. Throughout this program, it will become clear that a lot of data is available to digital or social media marketers. All activity online generates a data trail and the amount of data can quickly become overwhelming. KPIs are helpful to prevent it. And if you set your KPIs related to your goal ahead of time, you will protect yourself from getting lost in the data. KPIs are a tool to help you evaluate the success of your marketing. In our next video, we'll look at how you can define your KPIs.