Math is hard. Marketing is also hard. Digital marketing combines everything you hate about math with everything you don’t understand about marketing. We’re here to help. Being a performance marketing agency and consultancy, everything we do is based off of performance and efficiency, but it can be difficult to interpret. All of these metrics work together in a rube-goldberg machine of internet traffic. We’ll simplify these metrics and how to interpret them as it pertains to performance in your account.

Volume Metrics

The following metrics are a good measure of how much visibility you’re getting out there on the internet.

Impressions (All Channels)

At face value, this is simply how many people have seen your ad. Pretty straightforward, but keep in mind not all impressions are created equal. Context of when an ad is delivered matters a lot. A pre-roll video on YouTube leaves a different quality of impression on someone who wants to skip your content to get to the cat video vs an ad impression of someone specifically looking for your product or service

Reach / Users (Social Channels)

This is the unique accounts (Meta) or unique ID’s (Google Analytics) that have come in contact with your ad.

Clicks / Link Clicks (All Channels)

This is the number of times your ad has been clicked on. Meta differentiates between clicks engaging with your ad (swiping thru a carousel, etc…) vs clicking thru to your website. Clicks that don’t drive the user to your website are more like engagement clicks than volume.

Cost (All Channels)

This might be the most straightforward metric. This is the amount of extortion that the platforms are going to exact upon you. Occasionally the platforms will refund fraudulent clicks or issue credits for errors/outages so there can be discrepancy here on occasion.

Engagement Metrics

Clicks (All Channels)

As mentioned above, Clicks can be a bit of a hybrid metric of volume/engagement depending on what kind of click we’re talking about.

Engagements (All Channels)

In Meta or other social media platforms, engagement with an ad is going to be a measure of relevance. People commenting, reacting, following your account/page or clicking on the ad will give you a sense of relevance to your audience.

Conversions / Key Events (All Channels)

This is typically our goal. We are using ads to reach and communicate with our target audience in order for them to take a particular goal action.

Click through Rate (CTR) (All Ad Platforms)

This is the number of people that see an ad, divided by the number of people that click on the ad. You can also think of this as relevance. Be aware that this number can be deceiving at times - click thru rates that seem to good to be true certainly can. Some display placements make it impossible not to click on an ad, even though it’s irrelevant to the user, for example: mobile game ad placements. Pair this metric with Bounce Rate to get a proper view of engagement

Bounce Rate (Google Ads, Google Analyics)

This is the % of users that make it to your site, but immediately leave without performing any action. This is harder to get in Meta, but it’s available in Google Analytics and can be imported into Google Ads from Google Analytics.

You may be pulling users into your site, but for whatever reason, not messaging them correctly, or maybe you’re miscommunicating something to the user that’s getting them to click, but is actually irrelevant.

Conversion Metrics

Conversion Rate

This is going to be the number of sessions, or clicks divided by the number of conversions. While not exactly a marketing metric - this is going to be a metric that evaluates the quality of traffic you’re getting to the site. Higher conversion can be associated with higher relevance to the target audience.

Return on Ad Spend / Return on Investment / Cost Per Lead / Cost Per Acquisition

ROAS / ROI is going to be simply the revenue associated with the ads divided by the cost of the ads. Refer to the Small Business Series post about attribution when it comes to understanding the complete picture.

Not all ads are going to drive to a direct revenue goal. B2B ads are often going to drive to a lead goal where a sales person will make contact and close the sale. Cost per lead and Cost per Acquisition are pretty straightforward.

While not a marketing metric, a relevant sales metric is going to be quality lead-rate as well as close rate which will determine the quality of leads generated.

Average Order Value

This is revenue divided by the number of orders. Generating conversions can be costly, so getting as much revenue per order is a way of boosting ROI/ROAS without increasing conversion rate. There’s quite a bit on-site that can be done to boost AOV as well as making sure to message the correct higher-value products in your ads.

Average Order Units

This is the number of units sold per order. As a correlate to Average Order Value, it’s a good measure to see if you’re up-selling, bundling and packaging your products effectively.

Market Saturation Metrics

Impression Share

This is the number of impressions served divided by the total number of queries available and is a metric only offered by Google when running search campaigns. The specific number of queries alone is data that Google holds close to the chest, but with some fancy math, you can typically figure out what query volume looks like. Also, trends.google.com is a good tool for figuring out overall query volume for a given search term.

This is a good indication for market penetration or to see if there’s shifts in market behavior or seasonality. You can only serve as many ads as there are people searching so this metric helps you understand your impact.

Frequency

This is the number of impressions served, divided by the number of users reached. It’s the average number of times a particular user has seen one of your ads. This is also a good measure of market saturation. As you can imagine, seeing the same ad from an advertiser over and over again can get annoying and at a certain point stops being effective.

There tends to be a correlation between AOV and the number effective Frequency. As you can imagine, a $5 impulse online purchase can be converted fairly quickly and doesn’t need a ton of persuasion if any. A $100k b2b SAAS service probably takes quite a bit more wineing and dining so a higher frequency may be effective.

Conclusion

So there you have it - not complicated at all, right? While the definitions of these metrics are certainly important, what’s more important-er is the relationship of these metrics. We’ll talk more about the relationship between these metrics in the next post about Digital Marketing metrics.

Digital Marketing Metrics for Dummies