9 Digital Metrics: When to Use Them, When to Ignore Them
Data and Metrics
If there’s one thing that online advertising isn’t lacking, it’s data. Publishers, vendors, and agencies drool over the vast amounts of consumer and web user data available to them. It’s often presented against metrics, like cost per thousand impressions (CPM), cost per click (CPC), cost per action/acquisition (CPA), and countless others. If you’re a data junkie and Excel nerd (like me), it’s all too easy to present your efforts as a wall of data – huge multi-sheet grids of numbers strung together with complex formulas and stylish conditional formatting.
But this isn’t always the best approach.
Digital Marketing Analogy
Measuring digital marketing efforts is a lot like shopping for a car – there are lots of features and factors to weigh, but only the shopper knows what really matters. The shopper probably has an ideal car in mind, like a red convertible with a manual transmission, or some desired outcome, like the ability to tow a camper every weekend.
Irrelevant features clutter the conversation and complicate the transaction. In either case above, it might not do much good to tout fuel economy or off-road capabilities.
Just as a car shopper may have his or her dream vehicle, so too may a digital marketer have an ideal number of sales to generate at a specific budget. If that’s the case, then a conversion-centric metric like CPA is a nice match when it comes to planning, buying, reporting, and optimization.
9 Digital Metrics: When to Use Them, When to Ignore Them
So in order to meet the client’s needs and desires, it’s vital to know what to measure and how to measure it.
Here are nine digital metrics you can use, how you can use them, and when you can ignore them (or pay them less attention):
1. CPM (cost per thousand impressions): This metric is good for evaluating the efficiency of a campaign’s reach, but may not necessarily translate to awareness or behavior change
2. CTR (click-through rate): This metric is good for evaluating the relevance of a direct response offer to the audience, but may not be a good indicator of revenue generation or lead acquisition
3. CPC (cost per click): This metric is good for evaluating the efficiency of driving traffic to a destination URL, but provides little insight to the quality of that traffic
4. CPA (cost per action/acquisition): This metric is good for judging the efficiency of a campaign in driving direct consumer response, but is of little value to a purely branding campaign
5. ROI (return on investment): This metric is good for evaluating the efficiency of a direct response campaign’s media buys in generating sales, but doesn’t necessarily indicate change in awareness or brand lift
6. Click-through Conversions: This metric is good for judging the efficiency of a campaign in driving direct consumer response, but is of little value to tracking paths to conversion and previous touch points
7. View-through Conversions: This metric shows the long-tail efficiency of a campaign in driving consumer response, but may not necessarily show the efficiency of each previous touch point leading to conversion
8. Average Time on Site: This metric can indicate interested or curious visitors and an increase in awareness (especially if the visitors are new to the site), but may not translate to revenue
9. Average Pages per Visit: This metric can indicate interested or curious visitors and an increase in awareness (especially if the visitors are new to the site), but may not translate to revenue
Keep Your Metrics Focused
There are an almost infinite amount of other metrics you can use (especially if you start to combine them and form hybrids). Just because they exist doesn’t mean they provide useful data to the campaign. In many cases, you’ll want to keep the reporting simple and focus on those metrics that best reflect your core goals.
The key is to establish the most important metrics prior to campaign launch. This will help keep you, your campaign, and your client all on the same page.
Jason Holic
Digital Services Project Manager
Full of Diet Coke bubbles