Defining Success: What Performance Marketing Metrics Matter?
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New metrics and methods for measuring the success of a marketing campaigns performance are being tried and tested.
While a standard has never been established, besides conversions, CPM and CTR are considered “leading indicators” gauging the success of a performance marketing campaign. CPM and CTR often form the basis for initial optimizations on distribution as well as creative. However, this can be problematic since these metrics do not really capture the whole story in terms of the value that any aspect of given campaign can provide.
CPM and CTR can still provide valuable insight. But you just need to view them as a part of a bigger picture.
The concept of attribution modeling can shed some more light on this. Attribution modeling means that you must identify a set of advertising impressions that lead to a conversion. It’s an important facet of a campaign because it helps you figure out what led someone to engage in a behavior, which can lead to a conversion.
For display campaigns, this is can be done utilizng most robust ad servers by assigning weights to each prior display (and / or click). The industry is moving away from last click where 100% of the value of the conversion is attributed to the last ad the user clicked on prior to “converting.”
Along with proving your ad was seen and having a way to determine how consumers responded to it, engagement is also an alternative to simply measuring clicks. Engagement is a critical attribution dimension. In this context, “engagement” refers to a consumer’s interaction with an ad, video or image by hovering, clicking or otherwise interacting. What happens before and after the clicks is becoming increasingly important to marketers.
How do you decide what measurement methodology to use?
Rely on the data driven attribution that you’ve gathered while running your campaign by channel to make an informed decision. The data could reveal plenty of things about your campaign and help you effectively predict further campaign performance. It is also critical to look at the correlation of different marketing channels when attribution cannot be measured directly at the server level.
Take video advertising, for example. Generally, when people are watching videos, they want to skip through ads as quickly as possible. Most importantly, however, these people are looking to watch the video and not navigate away to purchase your product or service.
That being said, marketers have long known that sound and motion are powerful. Video ads can be effective, immersive and informative in ways that a banner cannot be. A user can go on to convert later through your search based campaign, through direct navigation to your site or when their interest is reinforced by a banner ad.
This brings to light the point of why you shouldn’t immediately optimize out publishers that provided a lower CTR, and why you need to look carefully at cross channel correlation to extend your attribution model
Today’s customer journey spans multiple devices and marketing channels as well as the online-to-offline experience. Marketers now have to determine the driving force behind a consumer’s digital decision process – their online journey and how their ad campaigns performed to either convert or influence a behavior.
To the greatest extent ever the data is there, it’s available and it’s critical not to undermine your campaign by making decisions on how to allocate your budget across various marketing channels based just on the most obvious points.
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- Defining Success: What Performance Marketing Metrics Matter? - July 7, 2014