To track the success of your campaign, it is essential to use data-driven insights. However, depending on the campaign dashboard that you use, the number of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) you can track can seem overwhelming.
Here we take a look at the top 5 KPIs that will be useful to track to help you manage paid media and monitor the success of your campaign.
Setting goals: following the SMART framework.
When it comes to using an effective marketing strategy for your next campaign the first step is to set out some goals. Setting clear goals from the start means that you can both design your campaign with these intentions in mind, and know what metrics to monitor on your campaign dashboard.
You may have heard of the SMART framework. This is an acronym that sets out the characteristics of what your intended goals should be. SMART translates into the following:
- Specific: what is it that you exactly want to accomplish? Make sure your goals are specific rather than covering a broad remit.
- Measurable: the goal needs to be something that can be measured and tracked using metrics.
- Achievable: the goal needs to be something that your campaign can realistically achieve.
- Relevant: the goal needs to be relevant to what it is your trying to achieve, and fit within the current socio-economic climate.
- Time-bound: the goal you set needs to have a target date so that you can check your metrics over time to check improvements.
Top 5 Paid Media KPIs to Track.
In terms of an advertising campaign, there may be a variety of goals that you have that are likely to connect with each other. They are likely to center around increasing your brand awareness, translating that awareness into conversions, and calculating the return on investment of what you have spent on the campaign. The majority of campaign dashboard software packages will have the metrics to help you to monitor these goals.
Here we take a look at the top 5 paid media KPIs that will be useful to track to help you monitor the success of your campaign.
- Impressions.
An important KPI to track in your campaign dashboard is the number of impressions. This is a measure of the number of times your advert was shown on screen, so it relates to the total number of people who could have looked at your advert. It is, therefore, an ‘impression’ of how many people saw your ad, rather than the actual number of people who clocked it.
The relevance of this KPI is dependent on how targeted your campaign was. If you wanted your advert to reach as many people as possible, you undoubtedly want this figure to be as high as possible. However, if you were running a more targeted campaign the relevancy of this figure may not be as indicative of the success of your campaign.
- Number of Clicks.
While impressions are important to give you an oversight of how visible your marketing campaign has been the number of clicks goes one step further. This KPI gives you a figure for the number of people that saw your advert and were inspired to take their interest one step further through clicking on your ad. The click will take them to wherever you linked to which is most likely to be your website, so with a high click rate you’re likely to see your website traffic increase significantly.
- Tracking the click-through rate (CTR).
At first glance, you may mistake the ‘click-through rate’ KPI as the same as click rate, however, there is an important difference. The click-through rate is the percentage of people that saw your advert that subsequently decided to click on it. So, for example, if there were 2000 impressions on your advert and 25 clicks this would work out as a 1.25% click-through rate.
The click-through rate helps you to determine how appealing your advertising campaign has been. A study conducted by WordStream calculated that the average click-through rate in Google Ads across all industries was 3.17%. However, what you should aspire to depends on your industry with higher click rates found in the travel and tourism sector (4.68%) and lower rates in consumer services (2.41%).
- Conversions.
To track the success of your campaign, you will have a conversion KPI which tracks whether or not the customer interaction you achieved resulted in the desired outcome. The conversion will depend on the intention of your campaign. If you wanted it to grow your mailing list a conversion would be someone giving you their email address. If you’re advertising a new product the conversion would be a purchase made.
The conversion rate should be listed on your paid metrics and is calculated as a percentage of the number of people that achieved a conversion who clicked through via the ad. This can be particularly useful if you’re using a Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign as, while this will generate a large number of visitors to your site, it may not result in achieving your desired conversion. A low conversion rate could indicate that the landing page that your potential customers reach is not particularly appealing, your advert does not accurately represent what is on offer or that you are not using the right way to appeal to your target audience.
- Finally… work out the cost per conversion.
Perhaps the most important paid media metric KPI of them all, the cost per conversion shows you the return on investment of your ad campaign. This is calculated by dividing the amount of money used for the campaign by the number of conversions achieved. This figure will indicate how much each of your conversions cost, with a low figure being what you should aspire for. You might have set a target for the cost per conversion figure and may judge the success of your campaign on how close you got to this.
Summing up.
The 5 KPIs listed here are invaluable when it comes to tracking the success of your campaign. They can also be used to compare multiple projects to assess where the return on investment was most profitable. In this way, you can learn what has worked best and what needs improvement to set your marketing strategy on the right path to success. There are many more KPIs that can be used to give insight into your marketing campaign but these 5 are certainly a great place to start.
