Measures turn a pile of raw facts into clear, digestible insights. They’re the answers to your business questions and the keys to unlocking the value of your data.

Janice creates a measure to quickly calculate her projected sales. She can further assess these projections by filtering and adding new fields to her visualization.

What is a Measure?

Philosophy of measurement has a broad spectrum of conceptual, metaphysical and epistemological concerns. This entry surveys central philosophical standpoints on the nature of measurable quantities and the relationship between measurements and theories.

Realists, such as Norman Campbell, characterize measurement as the empirical estimation of mind-independent properties and relations (e.g., levers that exert equal mechanical work, chemical solutions that are more acidic than others). However, this characterization also fits various perceptual and linguistic activities that do not usually count as measurements, and it fails to account for the theory-ladenness of measurement.

To avoid these problems, realists like Brent Mundy and Chris Swoyer construe measurement axioms as referring not to concrete objects or observable relations among them, but to universal magnitudes (e.g., the size of a 5 m line). They also argue that measurement theory, the underlying set of background assumptions about scale types and units, can be viewed as a genuine scientific theory with explanatory hypotheses and testable predictions.

Measures and Metrics

Many people use the terms measure and metric interchangeably but they are distinct. The key difference is that measures offer minimal information by themselves, while metrics repackage raw data into useful-yet-easily digestible insights.

For example, an e-commerce business can know how many sessions they have on their website each day but it doesn’t tell the whole story until they look at metrics like customer satisfaction rates or cart abandonment percentages. These metrics give the e-commerce business more context about their performance and allow them to determine what steps they need to take to improve performance.

Metrics are important for businesses because they help track progress towards SMART goals (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound). By tracking metrics regularly, a business can identify early warning signs of potential issues with its operations and make timely adjustments to prevent bottlenecks or inefficiencies. Moreover, a business can also use metrics to anticipate changes in the market and enhance its decision-making processes.

Metrics vs. Measures

While a measure may seem straightforward enough – for example, how many candles were sold in a given month – it conveys very little information on its own. If someone sends you a report that simply states that they sold 300 units, you have no idea whether those units were purchased by new customers or existing ones, nor how long it took to reach this number.

Metrics, on the other hand, contextualize a measurement with more meaningful data points that make it easier to determine progress towards a desired goal. Often shown on dashboards, metrics are crucial to understanding how well a business is doing, as they repackage the raw measurements into useful-yet-easily digestible chunks of information.

To illustrate the difference, a key metric could be sales per thousand impressions, which provides a clear picture of how well your marketing efforts are performing and gives you a good sense of whether it’s time to increase advertising budgets or improve sales techniques.

Metrics Versus Measures

Measures are fundamental units of data that convey relatively minimal information on their own. For example, a report that simply states “we sold three hundred units” provides little insight into what happened and how things might change in the future.

A metric, on the other hand, takes a raw measure and contextualizes it into something more meaningful. Take our earlier example of distance traveled: a measurement of kilometer-travelled alone would tell you only how far the person traveled; factoring in time allows you to know how long it took them and how fast they were traveling.

Measures and metrics are essential building blocks of key performance indicators (KPIs) that help you create goals, develop strategies, and evaluate your progress toward those objectives. Without the proper measures, you won’t have the information needed to track your business success over time or identify areas where you can improve your processes. The most effective metric tracking process depends on the type of data you need to collect and analyze.