What is a KPI in Digital Advertising?
Back in the Mad Men era, all advertising was artfully created and broadcasted to the masses without any need for indication of creative performance besides sales numbers or the occasional research study. Traditional mediums, like Broadcast Television, Radio, Print and Outdoor prioritized branding business through the use of storytelling. However in the last 25 years, we have several new ways to reach people beyond traditional advertising mediums. With the invention of the internet came the invention of digital advertising, and all of the various ways that we can reach and communicate with potential customers. Plus, add in mobile devices, and we have almost endless ways to reach, target, and track how any given advertising campaign or creative asset is performing.
Digital Advertising KPI’s, or Key Performance Indicators, are pieces of data that can tell how a campaign, ad set, or ad is performing over a given period of time. These data points can change depending on the date range you’re looking at, giving a good indication of progress from week to week, month to month, and even year to year. The best part about tracking KPI’s is that they can help both advertisers and businesses learn which messages or audiences are converting at a higher rate. KPI’s are also standardized across virtually all digital advertising arenas, such as:
Digital Advertising KPI’s, or Key Performance Indicators, are a variety of data points that can tell how a campaign, ad set, or ad is performing over a given period of time.
WG COmmunications Group
Which KPI’s should I be tracking?
There is no shortage of types of KPI’s, with dozens readily available for your choosing. For example, Facebook, one of the largest social media advertising platforms, boasts over 290 different KPI columns to choose from. That can be overwhelming amount data for even the savviest of advertisers, and completely unmanageable for a business owner who really just wants to know what is working, and what is not. So how do we know which ones to track? Well that answer could change depending on your goals or concerns.
Almost all KPI’s will fall into one of two categories: either PERFORMANCE or COST. Of course there are outliers, but these metrics are the ones the majority of advertisers and clients are most interested in.
Performance KPI’s tell us just that – how is the campaign performing. Are the ads getting enough results and at what rate are we seeing results? Cost KPI’s will tell us how much we are paying to receive the performance, taking into account our budget and campaign set up.
So what KPI’s should you be tracking in order to quantify your digital advertising success? We’ve made it easy for you by listing the top 5 KPI’s below that we believe one must track in order have a successful digital advertising campaign.
Top 6 Most Important KPI’s to track for Digital Advertising Success
How does WG Communications Group monitor KPI’s for our clients?
At WG Communications Group we pride ourselves on diligently tracking, analyzing, optimizing and reporting on all of our clients’ digital campaign perfomance. We track these KPIs both during and after a campaign, and we can learn a lot about what is working and how we can improve. These KPIs can also indicate changes we may need to make on traditional advertising mediums, and can help educate ourselves and our clients when planning future campaigns.
When judging KPIs it is also a good idea to not only compare your current campaigns to past campaigns, but also compare your KPIs against industry KPI benchmarks, which are readily available on the internet. These industry benchmarks take the localization and micro-focus off a single client, and broadens the lens to see how other companies are performing across an industry.
Lastly, KPI’s can help inform optimizations that may help improve campaign performance while the campaign is still active. When WG Communications Group monitors our digital campaigns, we are always making optimizations, ensuring that we are only using the campaigns and ads that are performing best and editing underperforming ads to help them do better.
Though it may seem tedious, careful daily monitoring and optimizing of digital advertising KPI’s is really the one true way to know if the digital advertising campaign is successful, which is why we at WG Communications Group include analysis and reporting with all digital advertising buys for our clients.