While the trackability of digital media gives us a lot of data to go off, measurement of digital media performance is not as straightforward as one might think. We must apply some key measurement principles to ensure that we remain focused, astute, objective, and inquisitive in the way we measure the effectiveness of our media activity.
Measurement Principles
Stay objective focused
The core purpose of measuring our digital media activity is to see how well they are delivering on our media objectives. Why spend so much time, money and effort on running media with nothing to show for it? We want to be sure that our media activity is working hard for us and solving our business problem.
Identify the right media KPIs for each objective
In order to keep the measurement of our media activity focused on its assigned media objective, we will need to identify measurable media KPIs for that specific objective.
This is where we have to understand that media KPIs are proxy values for measuring performance against specific media objectives. With digital media, we are limited to the metrics that we can actually track (e.g. engagements, clicks, video views etc.). These are just actions taken by our audience, and don’t necessarily tell us whether someone is actually aware of our brand or are seriously considering purchasing our product. We need to extract the meaning behind these actions and metrics and make some logical deductions of the KPIs that give us the best indication of performance against our media objectives.
That said, when it comes to conversion or sales campaigns, we should be able to track actual business metrics such as sales volume, sales revenue, average basket size and determine your ROI or profitability from media activity. So, there are exceptions where media KPIs are not proxies.
Interrogate the quality of your media KPI
This is an extension of identifying the right media KPIs where we go a step further to question the quality of the KPI. We often run with the most common media metrics and KPIs that we know of. However, with advanced tracking capabilities of digital media, we can start customising the KPIs for best effect.
For example, reach means nothing if our ads are not actually visible to our audience. We might want to look at viewable reach which ensures that at least 50% of our ad is visible for at least 2 seconds.
Another example is clicks. We often think a click is a great metric that tells us how many people have come to our website from our ads. However, in this day and age of fast scrolling and short attention spans, users may have accidentally clicked on your ad and clicked back immediately before you landing page loads. Hence a stronger metric might be post-click landing page visits.
Use multiple data points to enrich measurement
While it is important to assign singular media KPIs to each media activity, one metric alone often doesn’t quite give you the whole picture. By using a combination of data points, you can begin to understand how well your activity is performing to your objective.
For example, you might have a video campaign running for the media objective of generating awareness and curiosity for your brand. In such a campaign, your media KPI might be completed video views. This alone would be a good indication of how well received your video was. If people viewed it to completion, they are interested enough to now know what your brand is about. Now, if we paired this with other metrics like the number of clicks on the video to your website or the number of times the video was shared, that would give you a richer picture of how well the campaign performed.
Another example is assessing website traffic. Perhaps your media objective was to drive consideration of your product and you assigned clicks as your KPI. Clicks alone might be good enough to tell you if people are interested enough to engage with your ad, but if you pair it with landing page visits, time spent on site and actions taken on site, you would get a better understanding of the quality of clicks and effectiveness of your ad in driving purchase consideration.
Data means nothing if not compared
When deciding on the KPI, you are first identifying the metric that you think best represents the media objective. For example, you might choose clicks as a representation of someone considering your brand or product. If you measure success based on volume of clicks alone, you won’t learn much about how your ad is performing. Is 1,000 clicks good or bad? Until you compare it to a benchmark figure, you won’t really know if your ad is performing better than it or not. A benchmark figure is the number that you have identified as the standard to exceed. This often comes from doing market research or looking at past performance. If your benchmark was 800 clicks for the same budget and objectives, then 1,000 clicks means you are performing well.
Prioritise Efficiency and Effectiveness rates over Volume
When determining the key metric to use as your benchmark for performance, it is better to opt for efficiency metrics or effectiveness metrics as these use rate figures that factor in budget and cost differences, which volume figures don’t.
Efficiency metrics are ‘cost per’ metrics that look at the cost of receiving one unit of your selected media metric (e.g. Cost-Per-Click or the cost of each click). Effectiveness metrics refer to rate of an action actually occurring from all possible instances (e.g. Click-Through-Rate tells us the proportion of clicks we received from all ad impressions served, reflected as a percentage - 50 clicks from 1,000 impressions returns a CTR of 5%).
Measurement Cheat Sheet
Download for easy access and viewing:
Comments