Metrics and KPI's

 

If You Can’t Measure It, You Can’t Improve It. This quota from Peter Drucker is true more than ever before in the age of digital marketing. Perhaps more important than measuring it though, it understanding what you should be measuring.

With so many metrics from impressions, to click through rates, post engagement to say nothing of the plethora of demographic terms thrown around, it can be easy to get lost in the maze of advertising metrics and data. This is not helped by the sheer number of platforms out there and the fact that many of them don’t export their data in a standardised manner making cross-platform comparisons difficult.

The most import thing to remember when trying to measure any advertising campaign is the define the campaign goals and how those will be measured before the campaign is designed and executed. This way you can standardise the Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) and understand how they interact with one another.

Its also important that these KPI’s reflect what you actually want to achieve. There is no point measuring engagement with your social media posts if you’re actually aiming to drive business to your site to increase revenue. On that note, its quite possible that some of your KPI’s might need to be measured off the advertising platform, such as revenue or sales. Keep this in mind as you design your campaign.

Finally when assessing your advertising metrics be open to testing new ideas or systems. The digital ecosystem is a rapidly evolving one and what might’ve worked a year ago to drive your KPI’s might no longer be true. 

 

-- Aaron Bowman