Ad metrics, the measures of success and overall performance for any advertising campaign. Ad metrics are those that help tell the story of your campaigns progress, allow marketers to determine what is working well and what is not, and influence optimizations and future strategy. Being without ad metrics is like trying to go upstream without a paddle. Good luck.
In addition to helping marketers navigate their campaign performance, ad metrics are useful insights to understanding your audience. Using ad metrics, marketers can identify what audiences are doing on their site, what products or services they are interested in, and how they are engaging with their brand.
Important ad metrics for growth in 2022
We know what ad metrics are and their importance in a marketing teams’ day-to-day but where do you start? In an advertising world filled with what seems to be endless ad metrics, how do you know which metrics to push to the side and which metrics to focus in on?
Identifying your key ad metrics starts with understanding the purpose of your marketing campaign. Are you focused on driving increased engagement for a new product line or service? Focus on your reach and impression share. Are you focusing on driving more engagement through your brand’s social community? Focus on engagement metrics like shares, likes, comments, or page likes. Is your focus on driving customers to perform an action on your website? Focus on clicks, click-through-rate, and conversions.
By understanding and identifying your key ad metrics, you’re able to keep the metrics closest to your bottom line in a clear, focused view. Focusing on your key ad metrics, allows you to look past the hundreds of ad metrics and vanity metrics that come with each platform and can distract the team from what is driving performance and campaign success.
Most common ad metrics marketers track
From traditional to digital, the industry has continued to see new and insightful metrics roll in from advances in technology moving into 2022. Here is what marketers rely on most often and should continue to focus on in the new year:
- Reach
- Frequency
- Impressions
- Clicks
- Click-through-rate
- Cost-per-click
- Cost-per-acquisition
- Post Engagement
- Post Likes
- Post Shares
- Post Comments
- Page Likes
- Page Followers
- ROAS
Be wary, every metric above doesn’t translate the same across all platforms nor does every metric measure up the same in these ad platforms. This is where identifying which metrics matter in each of the platforms as well as when standardized and combined has significant importance to understanding your campaign health and ability to storytell.
Which Google Ads metrics to track
In the world of Google Ads, marketers can find themselves swimming in a mass of data. Before jumping into the deep in, make sure you understand how to navigate this large pool of metrics, what the latest trends are, and how to identify the bits and pieces that help tell your advertising story at each stage of the funnel as well as those that keep you aligned with your ROAS.
What Google Ad metrics marketers are paying attention to in 2022:
- Impressions: The number of times an ad is shown to an individual in the digital space.
- Clicks: The number of times an ad is clicked on and an individual redirects to the desired landing page.
- Cost-per-click (CPC): The average monetary value of what a click on an ad costs.
- Click-through-rate (CTR): The percentage rate at which individuals are clicking on an ad and redirecting to a landing page.
- Conversion: Depending on your conversion action, this is the count of conversions or desired action taking place from individuals who viewed on and clicked an ad.
- Cost-per-acquisition (CPA): The average monetary value of what each conversion on an ad costs.
- Return on Ad Spend (ROAS): The measure of efficiency of a paid advertising campaign.
Note: Google is transitioning to responsive search ads, which could impact how you track your metrics. Stay up to date with our breakdown of this transition.
Which Facebook Ad metrics to track
We live in a world where 4 billion people congregate on one or more social media platforms. On those platforms, information is being shared but more importantly, communities and relationships are built. Marketers should be leveraging their social media platforms as a way to foster community around their target audience and their brand. Understanding what the different Facebook metrics mean for your campaigns success can help build strong communities with purpose and drive towards the bigger picture and bottom line.
What Facebook engagement metrics marketers are leveraging in 2022:
- Reach: The estimated unique number of individuals who view an ad.
- Frequency: The average number of times at which an ad is served to an individual.
- Impressions: The number of times an ad is shown to an individual in the digital space.
- Clicks: The number of times an ad is clicked on and an individual redirects to the desired landing page.
- Click-through-rate (CTR): The percentage rate at which individuals are clicking on an ad and redirecting to a landing page.
- Post Engagement: Any action an individual takes on your ad, post, or page.
- Post Likes: The number of likes on an individual post or ad.
- Post Shares: The number of times individuals share a post or ad.
- Post Comments: The number of comments on an individual post or ad.
- Page Likes: The number of likes an individual page has.
- Page Followers: The number of individuals who follow a specific Facebook page.
Paid ad performance storytelling starts with data unification
As much as we’d like to assume it to be true, a clear understanding of the key metrics in each of these platforms doesn’t stop once they’re identified. This is where a data unification platform becomes a marketer’s best friend. Once your key ad metrics are identified, the data has to be compiled and organized in such a way that both sets of data, from varying platforms, all speak in a unified manner. Platforms like Joinr allow marketers to take the data they need from their favorite ad platforms and, without more work than clicking a button, see their data laid out in front of them in unification, ready to be used to create visually compelling reports on how their ad campaigns are truly performing.
Moving into 2022, Marketers can be hard pressed to see any slow down making it imperative to understand what metrics to quickly pull out of the mix and report on in addition to having a system in place that allows for automation of data extraction and unification in order to better tell their campaign performance stories.
