Marketo-DG2DA

PART IX: MEASUREMENT
METRICS
Measuring your digital advertising efforts is critical to your success. If you don’t know what has
worked in the past, how can you move forward? Since digital advertising’s success and
optimization is based on reoccurring metrics, we want to start by reviewing some of the most
common metrics digital advertisers track.
Front End Metrics
Front end metrics are most
commonly associated with
tracking the performance of
digital advertising. These metrics
are frequently provided by
advertising platforms, so they
don’t require any additional
software or work to understand.
In some cases, these metrics
might be considered vanity
metrics—metrics without
actionable meaning—unless you
tie the metric to some type of
performance tracking or goal.
Look at these metrics for both
trends and the big picture.
Additionally, you should combine
them with back end metrics,
which we will review later, so that
you have a holistic view of ad
performance across channels.
The following sections outline what
you should be measuring when it
comes to front end metrics.
Impressions
Impressions are the number of times
your ad is displayed, whether it is
clicked on or not. Based on your
targeting, customers may see
multiple impressions of the same ad.
Reach
Reach is the number of people who
received impressions of an ad. In
many cases, your reach number
might be less than your number of
impressions, because one person
may see your ad multiple times.
Clicks
This is simply the number of times
your ad gets clicked. It is a very
standard goal for many
advertising campaigns.
Click-Through-Rate (CTR)
Click-through-rate is a measure of
the efficiency of an ad. It is the
percentage of clicks to impressions.
It is one metric that advertisers can
use to compare ad performance on
different sites, even if they are not
the same size. For example, if a
marketer advertises on Platform 1 to
a pool of 5,000 people and on
Platform 2 to a pool of 200,000
people, the CTR of each of these
campaigns is a metric that the
marketer can compare to identify
which platform performed better.
So if your ad was seen 100,000
times (impressions), and 100 users
clicked it, your CTR is
100/100,000 = 0.01 or 1%.
CTR = Clicks/Impressions
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