One of the steps in developing a good incentive program is determining what it is you want to influence people to do. Typically that starts with the overall business objective. From there you determine the audience(s) that have the most impact on that objective and then look for the behaviors that influence that metric. Measure and reward those behaviors.
Most of the time the specific metric you want - the one relating to the behaviors - is not captured or tracked. Many companies will take a short cut and go directly to those things they currently measure and use that as a proxy for the real behavior they want to impact. 
As an example: The company wants to increase sales. They determine their sales force has the most impact on that objective so they target their sales organization for an incentive program. They know that they have a high probability of sale if the sales people follow a specific process. However, they don't track those steps. They train and communicate the steps - they rely on sales management to reinforce those steps in their "huddle sessions" - but they don't officially track those steps. Therefore, when they announce the incentive program they use "sales" as the reward event. Those who sell, get the reward - all based on the assumption they are following the steps.
But as we all know - there are many ways to skin a cat and rewarding the sales event will increase the salespersons desire to short cut the process, creating a lot of work with less than desirable results.
What the company should do is reward the steps to the sale. So to really drive behavior and impact the business on a sustainable basis the company should create new metrics for their incentive program.
This is a long-winded way of introducing a great article on the Juice Analytics blog about choosing the right metric.
Below is an image from the Juice site that graphically shows the elements of a good metric.
Most of the time companies focus on the "actionable" and "accessible" elements but give little attention to "common interpretation" and "transparent." These are key elements of successful incentive programs.
Most quality incentive providers can help you determine the appropriate metrics to use in your incentive program and create a way to track and measure the specific metric.
Don't make the mistake of using results instead of behaviors as the metric just because that is what you currently track and measure.
Results typically are rewarded through compensation. Incentives influence specific behaviors that will ultimately drive results.
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Marketing and Incentive Design Consultancy