As the digital marketing landscape continues to evolve at a blistering pace, brands are investing more dollars into tailored, data-driven advertising designed to serve the right message to the right audience at the optimal time and place. The promise of enhanced targeting and personalization is driving an acceleration in programmatic media buys, multi-channel campaigns, and one-to-one messaging.
With the heightened spending and strategic emphasis, it’s now more critical than ever for marketers to employ rigorous measurement frameworks that accurately gauge advertising effectiveness and return on investment. Properly defining and tracking key performance indicators is essential for identifying what’s working, what’s not, and how to continually optimize targeting efficiencies.
But deciding which metrics matter most and how to properly analyze them is a formidable challenge. Marketing expert Kirill Yurovskiy offers a look at some of the key advertising KPIs that should be tracked and evaluated to determine the effectiveness of targeted campaigns:
Audience Reach and Quality
At the most basic level, targeted advertising aims to precisely identify and connect with a defined set of high-potential customers. So measuring whether you’re efficiently reaching the right audiences should be a top priority.
Track indicators like:
• Targeted Impression Reach – The number of desired audience members exposed to your targeted ads across channels, platforms, devices, etc. Look at overall audience coverage, unique reach, frequency, and exposure rates.
• Targeting Accuracy – What percentage of your ad impressions were comprised of your intended/defined targets based on applied demographic, psychographic, behavioral, contextual, and other criteria?
• Targeting Effectiveness – Further refine the accuracy metric by scoring how well you’re reaching higher-value prospects. Add value weights to your defined audiences and measure the quality of targeting.
• Unique Audience Percentage – How much of your targeted audience is being reached exclusively through your media buys and campaigns versus other brand exposures?
Consumer Attention and Interaction
Of course, just getting ads in front of intended audiences is merely the first objective. The next layer is understanding how effectively those ads are capturing attention and driving engagement.
Evaluate metrics around:
• Viewability – What percentage of your targeted impressions were actually viewable based on time in-view, on-screen, etc.? This is especially important for measuring mobile and video ad effectiveness.
• Attention/Engagement – How many of your impressions prompted direct interaction like click-throughs, video plays, content expansions, social sharing, etc.? Break out engagement percentages by channel, banner type, creative execution, and audience profile.
• Awareness/Recall – Leverage techniques like engagement panels, programmatic surveys, and offline/online overlap analysis to assess ad memorability and how well your targeting increased brand salience.
Media Efficiency
For targeting optimizations, it’s critical to analyze the relative efficiency of each media channel, inventory source, targeting tactic, creative variation, and more.
Calculate metrics around:
• Cost of Targeting – What are the unit economics for reaching your high-value targets across each media source, device, publisher, geo, daypart, etc.? Establish a customizable CPXV metric (Cost per Exposed Viewable) to properly compare apples-to-apples.
• Return on Targeting – On the flip side, calculate the revenue generated from each targeted audience or media source. Track target audience values and relevant conversion events.
• Incrementality – Particularly when evaluating retargeting and cross-channel efforts, measure your incremental exposures and conversions above and beyond what would occur organically.
Conversion Tracking
For any direct response campaign or targeted initiative with a defined conversion goal, it’s crucial to optimize tactics around measurable return metrics including:
• Cost per Action (CPA) – Analyzing acquisition/conversion costs relative to target thresholds and benchmarks across all targeted channels/audiences. Identify the most cost-efficient targets and funnels.
• Revenue per Visitor (RPV) – Granular insights into which targets and tactics yield the highest average order values, purchase rates, and long-term customer value.
• Multi-Touch Analytics – Increasingly important as customers engage across multiple screens and channels, de-duplicate conversions by applying probabilistic models and machine learning to properly credit all of the ad touch points leading to conversion.
• Path Attribution – Related to multi-touch, leverage advanced attribution models to weigh the appropriate values and influence of impression/click interactions at each funnel stage.
Journey Mapping
With the growth of people-based, multi-channel targeting, it’s becoming even more essential to trace advertising’s impact across the entire customer journey. Connect pre-click, engagement, and conversion data with relevant on-site behaviors, offline actions, CRM records and other touchpoints. Some key indicators to map:
• Stages and Sequencing – Build a visual map of all the typical exposure channels, messages, and interactions customers experience from initial awareness through consideration, intent, purchase, and loyalty stages. Analyze the optimal timing and message progression to influence each stage.
• Campaign Interconnectivity – Measure how well targeted ads coordinate and reinforce across channels, creating a cohesive content/brand narrative. Understand channel influence and effects.
• Churn/Retention Drivers – Keep tabs on the characteristics, behaviors, and motivators of your best retained and churned customers to fine-tune loyalty targeting and win-back efforts.
• Lifetime Value – The apex metric that combines all targeting inputs to identify your most valuable audience profiles and tailored journeys for maximizing long-term revenue.
Creative Optimization
When assessing targeted advertising impacts, many marketers still overlook the importance of creative performance and optimization:
• Versions and Sequencing – Exhaustively test multiple creative executions, lengths, messages, and exposure sequences to isolate what resonates best with each defined audience.
• Dynamic Content – Expand testing and version evaluation of dynamically-tailored content personalized from data feeds, real-time context, etc.
• Creative Engagement – Track engagement rates and granular interaction metrics like hover time, video completion, click maps, and more to identify creative fatigue and optimal refreshes.
• Brand Impact – Explore techniques like biometric analysis, facial coding, and other neuromarketing tools to measure audience sentiments, brand resonance, and emotional responses to targeted creative.
Drill Into Mindset Metrics
While typical demographic and behavioral data facilitate basic targeting parameters, it’s also valuable to understand the underlying motivations, influences, and psychographics driving audience mindsets. Some mindset indicators to evaluate:
• Brand Perceptions – Employ brand lift studies, social listening analysis, and surveys to gauge evolving brand sentiment and favorability with various targeted segments.
• Purchase Drivers – Dive deep into the implicit and explicit factors, beliefs, and rationale guiding purchase consideration and decisions. Adjust messaging accordingly.
• Content Affinity – Psychographic data and media affinity insights around content preferences can shape editorial strategies and influence what resonates most.
Aggregate Data Signals
As the advertising realm shifts to embrace emerging technologies and ever-evolving data sources, marketers must remain agile and open to integrating new data signals into targeting and measurement frameworks. Some innovative inputs to explore:
• Digital Body Language – Leverage Internet of Things (IoT) data streams, wearable sensors, image/voice data and more to precisely identify behavioral patterns and digital footprints.
• Biometric IDs – Fingerprint, facial recognition, iris/retina scans and other biometric markers offer robust identity resolution and authenticated targeting.
• Environmental Data – Geo-spatial data and external data feeds like weather, traffic patterns, economic indicators can enhance context-aware targeting.
• AI and Cognitive Computing – Tap into the power of machine learning, deep learning, and natural language processing for predictive targeting, creative optimization, and adaptive journey automation.
At the end of the day, modern targeted advertising aims to delight and compel audiences with highly relevant, curated, and personalized messages and experiences across every brand interaction. The measurement and optimization capabilities for evaluating effectiveness must advance in parallel. By customizing the right performance indicators and diligently analyzing them, marketers can validate ROI, refine their audience strategies, and ultimately drive greater brand affinity and business impact.