Marketers are obsessed with metrics. Can you blame us? How else are we to measure the success of actions, prove our value and secure further budget? Metrics are an essential part of marketing and a huge aid to understand our audiences… if leveraged correctly. The problem is metrics often aren’t.
Focusing on the wrong metrics can be incredibly damaging. As the saying goes, the only thing worse than no data is bad data. This poor practice drains resources, wastes investment and drives us further away from the goals they’re supposed to aid. It’s a quite common trap that even the most seasoned marketers fall into. Today we’re putting a stop to it. We’re taking a look at common metrics used in marketing to avoid pitfalls and make our metrics matter.
Engagement Metrics
With the popularity of social media, it’s easy to understand why we’re fixated on engagements. Everyone wants their content to go viral because we’re told it should. This drive for undeniable social success has placed great value on comments, likes, and shares, but here’s where they fail…engagements don’t yield tangible rewards for the majority of businesses.
Engagements rarely correlate to commercial sales. Take likes for example. It’s far easier, cheaper and faster to like a post than to make a purchase. Few customers complete the full-funnel journey to convert, even if they frequently like your content. Then there’s comments, which exemplify the volatile nature of publicity on social media. Not all press is good press and nobody wants a stream of negative comments on their content, even if it means the audience is active. Shares are surely better right? They’re a deeper action which only amplify our messages. Success for shares entirely depends on where the content is being shared and to whom. A share to the wrong audience isn’t helpful in achieving lower funnel objectives.
What about video views and view through rates; two hugely sought after metrics given the popularity of YouTube, TikTok and Reels. Results from both these metrics hinge on one key factor – the user actually watching. Surely they are right? Platform dashboards said my users viewed content at 100%. What the platforms can’t possible know is that one user watched TV while my ad played on their device. Another did the dishes, unable to skip my ad with wet hands.
Where Engagements Mislead
There are a few places where engagement metrics mislead marketers. First they assume that all actions come from the target audience. While paid campaigns can help specify targeting, narrowing down the scope of the audience, all bets are off for an organic activity.
Second, these metrics imply that audiences are engaged, acting as a positive indicator of future conversions. Studies are showing more than 84% of youth audiences are active on at least two screens at once. They barely pay attention to one screen, let alone one with an ad playing. Modern measurement systems simply can’t tell when an audience is actually digesting content, just the amount of times it was served to them.
The biggest danger with engagement metrics, is placing too much value on posts with the most buzz. By doing so, you can cater to the wrong audience, while neglecting others. This practice can also block important testing of formats and themes. If all content creators focused only on content which blew up, they would never find the next big trend.
In the end you have to ask yourself whether these engagements are obtained for engagement sake, or if they actually contribute to our end goals. If they aren’t helping, then why should they carry any significance?
Paid Metrics
So if engagement metrics mislead us, certainly popular paid metrics are the solution. Advertising is a pay to play space, so we can trust those metrics to set us on the path right?
Paid metrics refer to the results we can monitor in more depth from in-platform reporting. These include impressions served, the cost per 1,000 impressions (CPM), and conversions. Each are frequently used to determine the success of campaign activity.
A question for you. What do impressions, clicks, registrations, and purchases have in common? Sadly none of these metrics carry any significant weight independently. Asking how many impressions you can achieve is the equivalent of asking how long is a piece of string. I could always achieve an expected number if only granted enough budget, enough time, and a big enough audience. Stating the number of impressions gained does little to tell me why that matters in the grand scheme.
Thankfully, there are a handful of paid metrics which are worth paying attention to.
Ratio Metrics
Instead I offer you what I term “ratio metrics.” Ratio metrics are those which are directly tied to some form of limitation. These include the total cost of a campaign, the flight duration, and a total audience size.
Cost per click, engagement rates, total audience reached and return on investment are all examples of ratio metrics. Cost per click factors in how many results were generated from a fixed budget. Click through rates take into account the total size of a given audience. Return on investment calculates how much profit was achieved in comparison to the amount spent.
The reason ratio metrics are so powerful is that they allow you to make a fair comparison over multiple campaigns. You can contrast the cost per acquisition between two differing flight lengths because they both factor in the amount spent. Similarly you can compare engagement rates across two social campaigns because the metric hinges on the total amount of impressions served. The ability to properly contrast performance against two campaigns with differing budgets, durations, and audiences cannot be understated. It’s imperative to know what marketing works and which doesn’t.
How to Start Making Metrics Matter?
Here’s my best advice for incorporating meaningful metrics into your measurement system.
Regardless of your desired metrics, establish baseline benchmarks. When you’re just starting out it’s perfectly fine to use industry-wide standards. Beyond that first campaign, you should always be competing against yourself. That’s because every business is unique, offering different products to nuanced audiences from a different position.
Second, it’s not enough to have one blanket key performance indicator. You need to be able to segment success by the level of campaign funnel, the audience type, and platform, otherwise you’ll always be comparing apples to kiwis. An awareness campaign on TikTok will yield entirely different results than a conversion one on Meta. Don’t treat them as equal.
Finally look to those ratio metrics, your best bet to compare performance from one campaign to the next. While not perfect, they are a far more accurate indicators of the true success of your campaigns and the best tool we have to making metrics matter.
