Seems like every year is declared the year of Measurement. 2023 doesn’t look different aside from the forced upgrade to GA4. For us digital marketers, the focus on measurement and performance is more than welcome. We love spreadsheets ☺
Advertising analytics should focus on what happens before the user clicks or visits the business website, as well as what happens after. That’s where the January Spring Media Buying team happily spends their workdays. If you want to think like a digital media buyer, here’s what we focus on and why.
Important metrics & how they work to help you:
Branding Metrics
These metrics measure the reach and impact of your advertising. Branding is critical for a well performing ad campaign because it creates awareness for a company, service or product as well as helps to differentiate that brand from competitors or other choices in the market.
Alongside awareness comes trust. A study done by Edelman showed that when a customer has trusted a brand for a long time, they are two times as likely to show loyalty to that company.
We’ve discussed in another blog how important it is to share messaging across multiple channels. This is something that is also vital in building that strong relationship. Loyalty and consistent interaction is vital for keeping customers and attracting new ones.
Maintaining a consistent brand build is necessary. In this article, a study referencing Les Binet and Peter Field declared that when it comes to the best strategy for brand growth, 60% of strategy should be focusing on mass engagement while 40% is on sales and reaching out to potential consumers. Click through rate and reach metrics are your friend when it comes to analyzing the effectiveness of these strategies and improving them.
Here’s an example of a social media report from this past quarter.
Engagement Metrics
This is exactly what it sounds like. Engagement metrics demonstrate how well an advertising campaign is speaking to its target audience. This could be any measurable action including:
- Clicks on a digital ad
- Video views or completion rates
- QR code scans
- Clicks within an eBlast
At January Spring, we track your engagement so that we can optimize the campaign to deliver the highest value for the advertising client.
This video campaign is showing incredible video completion rates (VCR). The video ad received an 86% completion rate on February 21st with all other campaign days this month maintaining higher than 70%.
Conversion Metrics
Conversion rates are important when it comes to tracking the different marketing and advertising channels that drive traffic to your website and people through the door. Many advertisers consider a click a conversion. We don’t think that takes measurement far enough. For campaigns under our management, we consider these all conversions:
- Visits to specific pages on a website
- Form Fills
- Purchases
- View throughs, where someone who was served an ad from the campaign comes to the website organically
This is a jewelry campaign that showed targeted impressions that delivered on-going walk-in foot traffic that resulted in sales for the business.
ROI Metrics
ROI is simply your return on investment. This metric allows you to see how much profit your business has earned when it comes to your advertising investments. The percentage you get from dividing net profit by the cost of investment (multiplied by 100) is highly valuable for comparisons and finding ways to yield higher. ROI can also be used to track your costs of advertising which is helpful for determining how efficient campaign runs are.
Within January Spring’s performance reports, we include an ROI metrics that multiplies the number of conversions by the value of a new customer.
In this example, the publisher provided us with the value of each new customer that walks into their advertiser’s location. That is how we calculated the ROI for this campaign. This $3,000 campaign yielded $22,000 in return!
