Defining the right key performance indicators (KPIs) for your campaigns can be challenging but it is essential to proving the value behind your marketing campaign and media dollars.

As advertisers, it is important to be able to track and measure your campaigns success, success is being able to attribute a conversion (consumer action) from an impression they earlier saw and being able to track measurable results.

The first step to any media plan determining the strategy. What are your clients’ objectives and goals – what are they trying to solve and how can you achieve them, realistically? Are they looking for brand awareness? Are they looking for leads and a direct response? Are they looking to improve their customer loyalty programs? All of these are different stages within the consumer’s journey and require different campaign objectives and KPIs. A lot of clients want conversions and want to know their ROAS but there are several steps within the marketing funnel to be able to achieve measurable results given the appropriate goal.

Once you define your marketing goal, objectives, and plan, you can then determine how your media dollars will achieve success. You will need to be able to define quantifiable metrics to measure like engagements, leads or purchases. You should be able to easily define these KPIs and to achieve them.

There are three main stages within the marketing funnel that capture your customer’s journey. Each stage in this funnel can help you learn where this customer is and what they have learned about your brand or company. The three main stages of a customer journey are awareness, consideration, and action – each have their own KPI metric that should be considered.

The Awareness Stage

The awareness stage of marketing is about becoming discoverable to a consumer for the first time and getting in front of consumers where they are. Brand awareness the first step in the marketing funnel and its important that consumers recognize and learn your brand in this stage to keep the brand top of mind through their path to purchase.

How to measure Brand Awareness? Start by defining a benchmark for your campaign to track progress. Look at historical metrics to gain insight and discover a reasonable benchmark or look at industry benchmarks if the brand is new. There is no one size fits all so consider a KPI that fits within your brand awareness strategy and one that is trackable and measurable. You can certainly have more than one KPI for your awareness campaign but its important to first define your primary KPI and your secondary KPIs.

Common Measurements:

  • Reach/Impressions
  • Unique visitors
  • Fan and follower growth
  • Branded Search keywords/ Search Engine Optimization Ranking
  • Percent of Video Views
  • Cost per Thousand Impressions
  • Video Completion Rate
  • Click Through Rate

The Consideration Stage

We like to consider the consideration stage the first “decision-making” stage within the marketing funnel. This is where this consumer already has awareness and is now considering your brand or company when they start to shop. This stage brands need to be able to inform customers how they stand out from their competition and why they should consider them an option before purchase. Similar to awareness stage, you can have multiple KPIs- but essential to identify which one is your primary target when optimizing media performance.

Common Measurements:

  • time spent on site
  • Engagement Rate, shares, comments, likes, @ mentions
  • Lead Generation,
  • Click-through-rate
  • email sign ups
  • customer reviews
  • add-to-cart
  • Cost per Click
  • Bounce Rate

The Action or Conversion Stage

The action or ‘conversion’ stage is when the consumer takes the action we want them to take such as a purchase, form fill, website visit or even an ad click (all depending on objective of the specific campaign). They have become aware of your brand, they have done research and have browsed your site, products, social media pages and now they are ready to make a purchase bringing them through the full funnel. It is important in this stage to be able to track the Cost per Lead or Cost per Acquisition, so you know if you have a positive or negative ROAS Or ROI. This is something that can vary greatly depending on the action you are looking for users to take, and it is key to establish what that is at the very beginning of the campaign.

Common Measurements

  • Cost per Acquisition
  • Sales
  • Leads
  • Cost per Lead
  • Revenue
  • Return On Ad Spend

Conclusion:

However, you determine your media KPI, it must be measurable and align with your campaign’s goals.

For example, if your client is looking to increase sales but only has a brick-and-mortar store and no eCommerce platform then the problem we need to solve is “how to get customers to their locations to make a sale.” Below is an example of the media strategy you can develop with the appropriate goals and measurable metrics to help achieve this clients’ goals above:

  • Brand Awareness – Reaching new fans on social media pages that have shown interest in products the client sells. The measurable KPi’s would be impressions, reach and followers.
  • Consideration – Target people who have engaged with your social media pages and/or who follow the pages with a “offer.” The “Offer” can only be used in store and can only be found on social media. The measurable KPI’s would be CPC, Lead (coupon download), Cost per Lead, CTR
  • Conversion – The customer goes into the brick-and-mortar store, buys something, and then uses their special offer coupon that they were targeted with, downloaded, and then made a purchase. The measurable KPI would be the printout coupon, foot-traffic measurement (shows that the individual went into the store)

Success will look different across every campaign and being able to choose a few KPI’s can help you define what success looks like. KPIs should align with the stage the customer journey is in that you’re targeting because if you don’t, you might be measuring your campaigns success against metrics that your audience isn’t in yet. So, defining your objectives first will help with finding a metric to measure. If you’re looking to increase eCommerce revenue while increasing media efficiency then maybe the goal is to measure the cost per conversion KPI.

If we didn’t align the right KPI then we wouldn’t have known of any sales since it wasn’t possible to know given that there is no online store presence. This shows that you need to make sure everything is trackable and measurable so you can benchmark if your campaign was a success or wasn’t and how you could do better.