Marketing OKR Template: How to Set Measurable Team Goals (Examples)

Open the marketing goals doc at almost any small business and you’ll find lines like “publish 20 posts a month”, “send 4 newsletters”, “redo the website by March”. They’re good intentions with a number stuck on the front. By the end of the quarter, the 20 posts are live and the newsletters have gone out. Nobody can tell you whether marketing brought in a single extra customer.

An OKR template for your marketing team changes the question from “what are we doing?” to “what changes for the customer and for revenue?”. Below you’ll find a template already filled in for a business turning over €1.2 million. After it comes a test for whether a key result is well written, twelve rewritten examples, and a review rhythm that works even with a three-person team where two of the three are outside contractors.

OKRs sit one level above the marketing team’s project plan. They decide which projects make it into the plan and which stay out.

Marketing OKRs in three sentences

The Objective is the direction for the quarter, written in plain words that everyone on the team understands. The Key Results are two to four measurable outcomes, each with a starting value and a target value. Initiatives are the work it takes to move the key results, and they stay out of the OKR.

Paul Niven and Ben Lamorte wrote the first complete handbook on the method, and they trace its origins back to the 1980s. In their words, key results define what it means to achieve a broad, qualitative objective, turning imperatives like “do it better” into clear, measurable indicators ¹.

For a company that installs air conditioning, “improve our online presence” is a wish. “Take site survey requests from the website from 12 to 30 a month” is a key result. Everyone nods the first one through in the meeting and nobody ever checks it. The second gets a flat yes or no at the end of March, with a number next to it.

Small teams often skip the rule about keeping initiatives out of the OKR, and it’s easy to see why. But put “redo the website” in your key results and here’s what happens: by quarter end the site is live, you score full marks, and enquiries are exactly where they were. An OKR that closes as a success on paper with zero effect on the P&L teaches the team the wrong lesson.

Why they work, and when they stop working

Goal-setting theory starts from a finding backed by a large body of research: specific, difficult goals lead to better performance than vague ones. The paper “New Directions in Goal-Setting Theory” sums up how this effect holds across different people, tasks, countries and time frames, whether goals are assigned, self-set or agreed with others. The same line of research looks at moderators, meaning the conditions that strengthen or kill the effect, and at group goal setting, which is exactly what a marketing team does ².

Then there’s the practical side. OKRs run on frequent feedback loops that show people how far they’ve come along the way. An OKR written in January and reopened at the end of March loses that mechanism and turns into an archive document.

And then there’s the flip side. A 2023 study comparing KPIs, KRIs and OKRs points out that none of these methods is perfect, and that they sometimes lead you astray ³. Here’s how that plays out in a small business. The key result says “500 leads from the website”. The agency drives down cost per lead with a generic form and a freebie, and the 500 leads really do come in. Your salesperson spends April calling back students, tyre-kickers and the odd competitor. The number is hit and revenue hasn’t moved.

For an OKR to hold up, you need four things:

• Few objectives. One or two per quarter for a team of fewer than six people.
• Weekly feedback. The current value of every key result gets updated every Monday.
• Outcomes measured on customers or revenue. Qualified enquiries, appointments, contracts, repeat purchases.
• A counterweight for every volume metric. Next to “leads from the website”, add “share of leads the sales team accepts as qualified”.

What’s the difference between OKRs, KPIs and tasks?

A health KPI is a number you always keep an eye on and protect. A key result is the number you want to move this quarter. A task is the work you do to move it. The same metric can switch roles. Cost per lead is a KPI while it’s stable, and it becomes a key result in the quarter you decide to bring it down.

In his paper on KPIs, KRIs and OKRs, Waleed Sultan separates three kinds of measure. KPIs compare company performance against targets, objectives or the industry. KRIs measure the actions and events that lead to an outcome. OKRs measure progress towards an objective ³. For a three-person marketing team, all you need is to turn that distinction into three columns.

Health KPI (always monitored)	Key Result (moving this quarter)	Task or initiative (work to do)
Google Ads cost per lead	Qualified quote requests from the website from 18 to 40 a month	Rewrite the landing pages for the three main products
Average response time to enquiries	Appointments booked from marketing leads from 10 to 22 a month	Call-back script within 2 working hours
Newsletter open rate	Customers inactive for 12 months who buy again from 15 to 40	4-email sequence to dormant customers

Before a key result goes into the template, run it past three questions.

1. If I complete it and nothing changes for the customer or for revenue? Then it’s a task, and it belongs under initiatives.
2. Does it have a starting value and a target value? Without a starting value, you’re writing a hope.
3. Can I measure it with data I already have, or will start collecting this week? If the answer is no, your first key result becomes building the measurement.

“Publish 12 articles” fails the first question. “Increase visits” fails the second. “Improve brand perception”, for a lot of small businesses, fails the third.

The marketing OKR template, filled in for a real-sized business

Take a company that makes and installs windows and doors, with €1.2 million in revenue and a showroom in a provincial town. Marketing is the owner for a couple of hours a week, one full-time in-house person, a freelancer for content and an agency running Google Ads. The numbers are there to show the method, so swap in your own.

Field	Filled-in version
Quarter	January–March
Objective	Make the website our number one source of showroom appointments
OKR type	Committed (sales works off these appointments)
KR1	Qualified quote requests from the website from 18 to 40 a month
KR2	Requests that turn into an appointment from 30% to 45%
KR3	Google Ads cost per appointment from €95 to €70
Health KPIs to protect	Response to enquiries within 4 working hours, average margin per job
Initiatives	Three product landing pages (uPVC, wood-aluminium, shutters), two-step form with a photo of the opening, call-back script, search campaign on “windows + town name”
Owners	KR1 in-house marketing, KR2 sales, KR3 Ads agency
Check-in	Monday at 9am, 15 minutes
Final score	KR1 0.68, KR2 0.8, KR3 0.4
Decision made	Objective kept for next quarter, Ads campaign narrowed to 6 towns, KR3 rewritten as cost per signed contract

That last row is the one you never want to skip. An OKR closes with a written decision on what to keep, what to change and what to drop. Without it, next quarter starts from scratch and the team rewrites the same goals in new words.

Here’s the blank version. Copy it into a Google Sheet or a shared doc that the whole team, contractors included, can open without asking for access.

| Field                       | To fill in |
|-----------------------------|------------|
| Quarter                     |            |
| Objective                   |            |
| OKR type                    | Committed / Stretch |
| KR1 (start → target)        |            |
| KR2 (start → target)        |            |
| KR3 (start → target)        |            |
| Health KPIs to protect      |            |
| Initiatives                 |            |
| Owner for each KR           |            |
| Check-in day and time       |            |
| Final score per KR          |            |
| Decision made               |            |

Twelve key results, rewritten

The left column is what you usually find in goals docs. The right column is the same intent rewritten as an outcome, with a start and a target.

How it’s usually written	How to write it
Publish 12 blog articles	Contacts generated by the blog from 4 to 15 a month
Grow Instagram followers by 30%	DMs that turn into a quote from 3 to 10 a month
Send a newsletter every week	Orders attributed to the newsletter from 8 to 20 a month
Redo the website	Product page conversion rate from 0.8% to 2%
Attend 3 trade shows	Appointments booked within 30 days of the show from 12 to 30
Launch the Google Ads campaign	Cost per qualified enquiry from €60 to €40
Get more reviews	Google reviews of 4 stars and up from 38 to 80
Create a lead magnet	Lead magnet sign-ups who book a call from 0 to 12
Improve SEO	Organic clicks on service pages from 300 to 700 a month
Get found by ChatGPT and other AI assistants	Enquiries where the customer says they found us through an AI assistant from 0 to 5 a month
Update the CRM	Leads with a recorded source in the CRM from 40% to 95%
More word of mouth	New customers from referrals from 2 to 6 a quarter

Look at the AI assistant row. The number is small and the measurement is crude (one question on the form: “how did you hear about us?”), but it’s data the business starts collecting and tracking over time. When you’re working on SEO, AEO and GEO, that’s the way to start: an imperfect measure from this week onwards, instead of waiting for the perfect tool.

How to write your team’s OKRs in one afternoon

Four hours is enough, with the owner, whoever runs marketing and the salesperson in the same room or on the same call. Bring in the contractors afterwards, for the key results they own.

2:00–2:45pm, last quarter’s numbers. Enquiries received, from which channel, how many became appointments, how many became contracts. If a number is missing, jot it down on a separate sheet and keep going.

2:45–3:30pm, one objective. The guiding question is where you lose the most revenue between first contact and signature. If the enquiries are there but slip away on the phone, the objective is about conversion. If the salesperson’s diary is empty, it’s about acquisition.

3:30–4:30pm, three key results. Each one has to pass the three-question test. At least one should measure quality, to balance out the volume ones.

4:30–5:15pm, initiatives and owners. Next to each initiative, write the key result it’s meant to move. Each key result gets exactly one owner.

5:15–5:45pm, AI review and sign-off. Paste the draft into Claude or ChatGPT with a prompt like this one.

You are an OKR reviewer for the marketing team of a small business with
€1.2 million in revenue that sells [product or service] to [type of customer].
I'm pasting the objective and key results we've written.

For each key result, tell me whether it describes an outcome or a task.
If it's a task, rewrite it as an outcome measurable on customers or revenue,
with a starting value and a target value, and move the original task
to the list of initiatives.
Flag every key result with no starting value and say which data
we'd need to work it out.
If a number is missing, write [TO BE MEASURED] in its place and leave the rest unchanged.

OKRs to review
[paste here]

The [TO BE MEASURED] instruction does a lot of work. Without it, the model tends to fill gaps with plausible numbers nobody ever measured, and those numbers end up in the template looking like real data.

Quarter zero, when you don’t have starting data

Plenty of small businesses discover during the OKR afternoon that they don’t know how many enquiries come from the website. The form sends everything to a shared inbox, half the calls come in on the landline, and the CRM, if there is one, has an empty “source” field.

In that case, the first quarter is about building the measurement. Goal-setting research treats the role of learning goals as a topic in its own right ². When you don’t know the road yet, the sensible goal is to learn it. For the windows company, a quarter-zero OKR looks like this:

• Objective. Know where our customers come from.
• KR1. Website forms sending a conversion event to Google Analytics, from 0% to 100% by 31 January.
• KR2. Leads in the CRM with a source filled in, from 40% to 90% by the end of February.
• KR3. Consecutive weeks of clean enquiry-by-channel data, from 0 to 8 by the end of March.

The Google Analytics documentation explains how to install the Google tag (gtag.js) to measure site interactions and record custom events. It also covers automating reports with the Data API ⁴. Form submissions and clicks on the phone number are the two events KR1 needs. By the end of March you have the baseline to write real OKRs in the second quarter, and any feeling of three wasted months goes away the moment you see your first report by channel.

Committed OKRs and stretch OKRs

A three-person team can handle two OKRs well, as long as you say from day one which category each belongs to.

A committed OKR is one someone else’s work depends on. If your salesperson needs 22 appointments a month to hit budget, that number gets an achievable target and the expected score is 1. A 0.7 here means that come May, the salesperson’s diary is half empty.

A stretch OKR is for trying something new with a high target. For the windows company, it might be “Become the company AI assistants name when someone asks for a window installer in the area”. Here a 0.6 or 0.7 is a good quarter, because the target was set high on purpose.

If you don’t write the label in the template, the team applies the same tolerance to both. The usual result is a 0.7 being celebrated on, wouldn’t you know it, the OKR sales was relying on.

How do you score a key result?

The score runs from 0 to 1. Take the value you reached, subtract the starting value, and divide by the gap between target and starting value. If enquiries go from 18 to 33 against a target of 40, the score is 15 divided by 22, or 0.68. The formula also works when the target is lower than the starting value, as with a cost.

In the windows example, cost per appointment went from €95 to €85 against a target of €70. That’s 10 divided by 25, so 0.4.

The number matters less than the conversation it starts. Faced with a 0.4, the first question is whether the initiatives actually got done. If they all did, the hypothesis was wrong: the “windows + town name” campaign brings clicks but few appointments, and needs changing. If half the initiatives are still open, it’s a capacity problem, and next quarter should be planned with fewer initiatives. A clean 1 on a stretch OKR two quarters running means the target was too low.

For a small team, the review rhythm rests on three meetings:

• Every Monday, 15 minutes. Update the current value of each key result, mark its status (on track, at risk, stalled) and pick one blocker to clear by Friday.
• End of month, one hour. Go through the initiatives, kill the ones eating time without moving the numbers, and open one new one at most.
• End of quarter, half a day. Scores, written decision, next quarter’s OKRs.

For the Monday check-in, a Google Sheet with one column per week is all you need, hooked up to Looker Studio if you want to see Google Analytics data without copying it over by hand. On Friday, export the table and give it to Claude with this prompt.

I'm pasting this quarter's key results table with starting value,
target and current value week by week, plus the list of initiatives
and their status.

Calculate the score for each key result using the formula
(current - start) / (target - start).
Tell me which key results, at the pace of the last 3 weeks, will finish
the quarter below 0.7.
For each one, write two questions to ask the owner at Monday's check-in.
I only want questions tied to the numbers in the table, no generic advice.

On Monday the meeting starts from those questions and you’re done in fifteen minutes.

AI as a reviewer that hunts for shortcuts

You prevent the 500-useless-leads problem before you sign off the OKR. Take every volume key result and ask a model to find the worst possible way to hit it.

This is a key result for our marketing team: [key result].
Imagine you're a supplier paid only on this number.
List 5 ways to hit it that would hurt the business
(low-quality leads, excessive discounts, off-target customers, promises
the sales team can't keep).
For each one, suggest a second key result or a health KPI that would make
that shortcut visible within two weeks.

For “500 leads from the website”, the typical answer lists generic freebies, forms with no qualifying fields and campaigns on overly broad keywords. The counterweight that comes out of it is almost always the same: “leads accepted by sales as qualified, at least 40%”. Add it as a health KPI and the shortcut is closed.

From key result to the working week

An OKR that never reaches the calendar stays a statement of intent. The handover happens on three levels, each answering a different question.

The quarter, through the OKR, defines what has to change. The project plan defines the order the work starts in, with initiatives spread over twelve weeks and January’s ahead of March’s. It’s the quarter’s map, the one the team checks when it needs to know what comes first. The week, in the marketing team’s weekly planning, defines who does what by Friday.

In the windows example, KR1 generates the initiative “three product landing pages”. In the plan, that becomes the uPVC page in weeks 1–3, wood-aluminium in weeks 4–6 and shutters in weeks 7–9. In week 2’s planning there’s just one task: “draft of the uPVC landing page to the freelancer by Thursday, with the 8 most common questions collected by sales”.

One rule holds the three levels together. Next to every initiative in the plan, write the key result it’s meant to move. If you can’t match it to one, it’s business-as-usual work, to be handled as such or cut to free up hours.

Questions we always get

How many OKRs does a three-person marketing team need?

One committed and at most one stretch, with three key results each. Six numbers to update every Monday is already plenty for a team where two of the three people also work for other clients.

Who writes the OKRs, the owner or the team?

The owner proposes the objective, because they know the company’s numbers. The key results get written together with the people who’ll have to move them. Goal-setting research finds a positive effect from goals whether they’re assigned or set jointly ². In practice, key results people agreed to hold up better when something unexpected lands mid-quarter.

Should OKRs be tied to bonuses?

Better to keep them apart. When the bonus depends on the score, people quickly learn to propose targets they already know they’ll hit, and the stretch OKR vanishes from the template. Tie bonuses to health KPIs and the year’s sales results; OKRs stay a tool for deciding where to put your hours.

Sources

Footnotes

1. Objectives and Key Results: Driving Focus, Alignment, and Engagement with OKRs. books.google.co.th ↩

2. New Directions in Goal-Setting Theory. intellectum.unisabana.edu.co ↩ ↩² ↩³

3. “Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), Key Result Indicator (KRIs) and Objectives and Key Results (OKRs)” A New Key Incorporated Results (KIRs) Approach. dx.doi.org ↩ ↩²

4. Google Analytics. developers.google.com ↩