How do you measure a copywriter?

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At some point, everybody at Yalantis started calculating their KPIs. Sales would calculate the number of deals they closed per month. Developers would calculate the number of bugs their software produced. Managers would calculate the level of happiness in their client’s feedback.

And I was like copywriter’s KPIs? Meh. That’s subjective. You can’t measure a copywriter's performance.

Let’s make it clear, I am not talking about marketing KPIs here. Your copywriter is only a little guilty of that embarrassing number of leads you got last month. If you’re a marketing manager, you’re the one to blame. Not your copywriter.

As a marketing manager, I have my own KPIs. They are CPL, CPqL, and the number of qualified leads. Now I needed to calculate my copywriters’ KPIs. I didn’t know how to do it. And to be honest, I didn’t want to.

But then, my friend, colleague, and business partner Ian said: “I know you hate it, Kate. But you’ve got to do it.”

And he was right.

We needed to create the space for growth for our copywriters. And we also needed to base our feedback on their performance on something measurable.

We sat down in an empty office space in Kyiv on that rainy winter evening and started thinking about how to measure our copywriters.

Copywriter's Performance KPI is the number of articles

The first KPI we came up with was the number of articles one copywriter writes per month.

I know what you’re thinking. The number of articles says nothing about their quality. You’re right. Quality matters. And we’ll get to it a bit later.

Now let me explain why the number of articles is actually a meaningful metric.

Let’s assume that we’re talking only about the number of high-quality articles. The ones that get published.

To write a high-quality article, your writer needs to spend time. The more time they spend, the less monthly articles you get. But let me ask you a question. If a…