Picture this: you’ve taken on board all of the lessons of the School of Marketing so far that pertain to digital marketing to create an outstanding, engaging digital marketing campaign. You log into your accounts to check the progress and are faced with a wall of data. How do you work out what’s going on with your campaign – is it performing well? Is it doing anything?
In this final lesson of the TA6 School of Marketing, we’re going to learn all about the metrics that matter when it comes to measuring the performance of digital marketing campaigns.
The Essentials
Consider this your glossary to the essentials of digital advertising metrics.
Impressions: The number of times that your advert has appeared on someone’s screen.
Clicks: The number of times that your advert has been clicked on.
Click-through Rate (CTR): This is calculated by dividing the number of clicks by the number of impressions.
Cost: The amount that you’ve spent on the adverts/campaign.
Cost-per-click (CPC): The amount you’ve paid for your advert divided by its total clicks.
Reach: This Meta-specific statistic denotes the number of individual accounts that have viewed your advert at least once.
Frequency: Another Meta-specific statistic showing the average number of times an individual has seen your advert.
Results/Conversions: Results on Meta, Conversions on Google, this shows the number of times that a pre-defined ‘action’ has taken place on the website linked to the advert.
Conversion Rate: A Google-specific statistic which divides the number of Conversions by the number of Impressions.
Cost-per-conversion/result: The amount that you’ve paid for the advert divided by its total conversions/results.
Diving Deeper
It’s tempting to think ‘the higher the better’ with most of these figures, and in many cases, that’s true. However, when you start your reporting/measurement journey, you won’t know what a ‘high’ number is. Each advertiser is completely different, and whilst there are industry averages, the only way that you can effectively use your metrics is to consistently examine and report on them.
Equally, some metrics can be deceptive. Take Impressions; this will almost certainly be the highest figure in your data set, but just because it has appeared on lots of screens doesn’t guarantee that the person has looked at or taken in the content of your advert, and the same people may be having the advert appear on their screen multiple times. With this in mind, Reach is a much more valuable metric to examine, where possible, as it at least eliminates duplicate viewings.
This is not to say that Impressions don’t matter, they are a valuable way of showing the size of the Target Audience of your campaign and show how effectively your advertising software is distributing your adverts. It is therefore a particularly useful metric for brand awareness campaigns.
An essential tool for measuring the engagement levels and general reception of your adverts is the Click-through Rate (CTR). Whilst the number of clicks is still crucially important for most campaigns, given that most leisure-based campaigns have a webpage destination that we’re trying to direct customers towards, the CTR shows in black-and-white terms how engaging your adverts are by showing the volume of people who they feel compelled to click on your advert when it appears on their screen. Again, it is essential to track your average CTRs over time in order to maximise the benefits of this. Furthermore, CTR can assist in determining the advert content and style that most attracts your customers; if certain types of adverts or advert content consistently achieves a higher CTR, this clearly resonates well with your customers.
The number of Conversions and your Conversion Rate is an extension of the importance of CTR, especially in sales-driven campaigns. With Conversions typically being the primary measure of a campaign’s success, the number of Conversions is a quick, easy way to assess the performance of your campaign versus your original targets. Meanwhile, the Conversion Rate will help you to assess the efficacy of your adverts as a vehicle taking your customer through the Sales Funnel.
Cost-per-click (CPC) is not to be ignored either, as this is the key to assessing both competition levels and the quality and relevance of your adverts. Most advertising platforms operate a pay-per-click advertising model, whereby you set a maximum bid for your advert – representing the highest amount that you’re prepared to pay for a click on your advert, before the adverts are entered into an auction-like system in which the adverts with the most relevant keywords and highest quality content are prioritised. Consistently monitoring your CPC will help to steer your keyword choices and advert content – if it is regularly high, then you will need to choose less popular keywords (popular keywords result in more competitive bidding), and/or adjust the quality of your advert – namely through optimising your landing page and making sure that the advert’s content matches the keywords.
Approaching Reporting
Reporting is a vital part of the digital advertising process for you, the marketer. Whilst it is, of course, important to inform other stakeholders of the performance of your digital advertising activities, reporting enables you to get up close and personal with the numbers, enhancing your understanding of your advertising efforts and your audience to create increasingly effective campaigns.
Picking the metrics that matter can greatly aid the reporting process when it comes to sharing information with stakeholders. Going in-depth into all of the numbers and ‘marketing jargon’ can be extremely off-putting to those not in the know, so stick to high level figures, and ensure that you clearly explain their meaning. For example:
The click-through rate for this month’s campaign was up 0.5% to 3.5%, which shows that our audience is responding well to the new video that we’ve included in the adverts. We will therefore be creating more video-led adverts moving forwards.
Our number of Clicks for this campaign are much higher than usual, however, the Conversion Rate is lower than we’d expect. This indicated that there was something on the landing page that was putting customers off completing the process. I think that it may have been the length of the contact form, so for the next two weeks of the campaign we have changed it to a simpler, quicker process.
Most importantly, don’t leave reporting until the end of your campaign! Monitoring and reporting throughout your campaign, even if it’s just for yourself, is essential to allow you to pick up on things that may need tweaking in order to maximise your campaign’s efficacy.
So, is my campaign doing well?
The eternal question we’re asked by stakeholders and ourselves as marketers. The best way to measure this is to go back in time to the sprightly version of yourself that is tasked with setting up a digital advertising campaign and tell that person to set targets. Ideally, SMART ones. By having defined targets in place, you can use your metrics to determine whether you’ve achieved them. Sounds simple, but all too often busy marketers plough ahead with the target of ‘selling memberships’ or ‘getting people to our website’, which are far too vague to be useful. Combine this with long-term, consistent monitoring of your advertising efforts, and you’ve got yourself a cohesive and effective approach to your digital advertising.
Here’s a couple of examples of how you could approach a campaign in this way:
You want to raise the profile of one of your council’s smaller leisure centres.
You decide to run a brand awareness campaign, with the aim of the adverts being seen 100,000 times.
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You build holistic, informative adverts on social media and search platforms, with brand awareness as your goal. You will measure the adverts’ success based on Impressions, with Clicks and CTR as a bonus.
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You measure the success of your adverts primarily using the number of Impressions you receive and utilise the other metrics to tweak and enhance your adverts whilst the campaign is running.
You are told that swimming memberships are struggling, and we need a campaign to increase them, fast.
You determine that a promotion-based campaign would drum up some much-needed numbers.
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Based on this, you decide that you will run a digital advertising campaign in which Conversions are the goal. You aim to achieve 100 Conversions in the month-long campaign.
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You set up a landing page containing a link to claim a free one-month swimming membership and add conversion tracking to the link.
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You create engaging adverts on a mixture of social and search advertising platforms, with Conversion as your goal.
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You measure the success of your adverts primarily using the number of Conversions you receive and utilise the other metrics to tweak and enhance your adverts whilst the campaign is running.
Final Thoughts
Metrics matter. As busy marketers, it’s incredibly easy to move swiftly from one campaign to the next, not taking time to breathe and assess the performance of what we’ve just done. However, if we don’t carve out the time to delve in and examine what went right and what could be improved upon, how are we to improve and enhance our efforts moving forward?
Further, if you are not being asked for reports, or aren’t sure that people will be interested, now is the time to make them interested. Digital advertising campaigns are a fantastic insight into how the public thinks and acts, and it’s your job as a marketer to show these trends through your data.
It might feel daunting at first, but stick to it. Once you get the bug, you’ll know some of your key metrics off by heart! (Or maybe that’s just me…)