The Online Advertising Playbook: Proven Strategies and Tested Tactics from The Advertising Research Foundation

Winning Plays

Metrics need to be tailored for each brand and company with respect to its particular objectives. There is no magic number. Instead, smart marketers use a constellation of metrics that are guided by four considerations:

1. Determine your online advertising goals. Define what you’re looking to accomplish with your online campaign—site traffic, lead generation, online sales, offline sales, and so forth. Ask if your goals are relevant to the business results you seek. If they’re not, why measure? Don’t confuse tactics with objectives.

2. Make sure they’re realistic. Are the goals achievable within the time frames you’ve established? Are you able to assign the right resource levels to them with the right level of capability and focus? Do they require some future event to occur in order for them to be accomplished?

3. Ensure that they’re measurable. We all know that business objectives need to be stated clearly and quantifiably. Objectives that specify capturing 300 qualified leads in 30 days or gross product sales of $9 million in the next quarter leave no room for interpretation. Progress against them is easily measured, and you can use a variety of tools for tracking, from local spreadsheets to rich analytical systems.

4. Be certain you have the right metrics to measure your objectives. There’s no point in tracking a specific metric, say average sale per visitor, if you don’t have the sales data, visitor data, and dates of sale at hand. Recognize that some metrics are easily available, ...