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7 Important Paid Media KPIs to Measure in 2024

Linda Emma on January 9, 2024

From its inception, digital marketing has enabled its users unprecedented insight into the campaigns they run, the results they achieve, and their impact on the bottom line. But the mountain of available data can be overwhelming to the uninitiated. And its rapid evolution often leaves novice digital marketers in a constant catch-up mode. Particularly since Google decided to sunset Universal Analytics in 2023 and roll out GA4, there has been simmering panic. Universal Analytics was friendly and familiar. Now, in one fell swoop, all its historical data was gone, and a new tool was put in its place. Users had no choice but to switch to GA4 last summer.

Whether you’re still reeling from the GA4 switchover or have never really had a handle on the data you measure, there are some key performance indicators you should keep track of in 2024 as you chart the success of your paid media campaigns. And while what you measure will depend upon your industry and the individual campaigns you run, here are the KPIs you’ll probably want to pay attention to this year.

1. Measure Impressions and Reach

Search and display campaigns can help get—and keep—your brand at the top of your prospect’s mind. They can increase awareness of your company and the products and services you offer. So, it’s important to measure how many times your ad is displayed and the number of people who likely saw it. Reach tells you how many times an individual user saw your ad and impressions tell you how many times your ad was seen, even if by the same person more than one. Both are important metrics to consider for paid media. You should also look at your cost-per-1000 impressions (CPM) to keep track of your budget and campaign ROI.

2. Click-Through Rate

Most of your campaigns are designed to have users take an action that gets them closer to a purchase. Impressions are good for branding, but clicks can be higher value actions. The user that clicks on an ad is engaged and interested in what you have to offer. When they click through to your landing page, you increase the likelihood that they will fill out a form or make a purchase. That’s why the click-through-rate (clicks your ad receives/number of impressions) is one determinant of a campaign’s success.

3. Cost-Per-Clicks

Another important KPI is your cost-per-click (CPC). CPC helps to understand how well your ads perform in auctions, where you place against your competitors, and how your budget is being consumed. Paying attention to CPCs can also help you fine tune campaigns to produce better results. But it’s important to note that cheap clicks that don’t convert further down funnel can quickly drain your digital marketing budget without producing results.

4. Measure Events

Specific to GA4, you can customize what you measure through “events.” You choose what is worthwhile in your customer’s journey. Whether a click or a page load, a download or a purchase, you determine what matters and track it through Google. You can see how far a user scrolls in a blog post or the engagement users have with your video. Because events can measure virtually any interaction and data point a user has with your site, page, or app, you garner a fuller picture of the actions that lead to sales. You can even assign a monetary value to specific events using parameters.

5. Conversions

All the events you chart in GA4 can lead to a conversion. You can customize conversions, but they are often a request for information where a user fills out a form. In doing so, to some degree they’re saying: sure, let’s keep in touch. That direct customer engagement is one of the true benefits of digital marketing. When the user gives you the nod, you have the privilege of providing them with customized messages and content that keeps them interested. They’ve converted from a stranger into a true prospect.

6. Cost Per Acquisition and LTV

If you’ve ever been tempted by an offer of cheap leads, buyer beware! What should matter to you far more than affordable leads that fill the top of your sales funnel are those that make it further along the customer journey all the way to a sale at a reasonable CPA. Those $50 leads that waste your team’s time and attention can be astronomically more expensive than they appear. Follow them down-funnel and determine which turn into clients, how long it took, and whether they come back time and again. For example, the savvy car dealership knows that a $500 lead may sound expensive at first blush, but if it converts to a buyer who comes back for a new car every few years and brings along family and friends, it represents a windfall in profits.

7. Digital Marketing ROI

Especially if you’re in charge of answering up the food chain on marketing results, the ROI you can prove may be critical to your budget, your department, and your standing within your organization. Calculate return on investment by dividing the profits you saw from a particular campaign against its costs. For example, if you invested $5000 in a campaign and your profit was $20,000, you divide the $20K by $5K to get a 4:1 ROI ration. For every dollar you spent, you got $4 in return!

At CloudControlMedia, we are frequently astonished by how few of these metrics new clients have been paying attention to. We get it. There are a lot of moving pieces in digital marketing and when you run multiple campaigns for several products, programs, or services, it’s a lot to keep track of. But we have a secret weapon! The CloudControlMedia Platform busts down digital marketing silos and lets campaigns, platforms, channels, and even keywords compete to see which produce the best results, by tying directly into a client’s customer relationship management system. We know when a click is a bargain price or a waste of money. We know when the dollar you spend produces one or ten! Find out more. Request a demo today.

Linda Emma is head of marketing at CloudControlMedia. With more than two decades experience in digital marketing, she helps clients tell their unique stories while driving performance metrics that translate to results.

What the FLoC! Are the Cookies that Advertisers Rely on Crumbling?

Linda Emma on September 15, 2021

When you think Apple, you probably think Apple Watches and TVs, iPhones, iPads, iPods, or all the other i’s it counts among its products. But a small percentage of its business is actually paid advertising and Apple has recently gained some big attention for what it’s not doing in that arena: sharing user data. In the name of privacy, the company has instituted Intelligent Tracking Prevention and App Tracking Transparency and while it’s already wreaking havoc for email marketers, there’s an even scarier scenario on the digital marketing horizon. Google is expected to follow suit. The Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) is Google’s answer to privacy concerns and its anti-cookie measures could have a seismic impact on advertisers.

What Are 3rd Party Cookies All About?

If you’ve ever run a product search online, you’ve likely been cookied. Let’s say you’re in the market for a new kayak. You go on Google to do a bit of research. Maybe you even click on an ad at the top of the page. You close out your search without a purchase but the next time you log on, you see an ad for a kayak. And then another. And another. That darn boat is following you all over the internet, even from device to device.

That’s because an advertiser was able to put a snippet of code that gets saved to your hard drive to be recalled at a later time. This code—or cookie—can record info about your internet habits. What you search, where you buy, what ads you’ve seen, and even your location are all there for advertisers to note and use. It sounds pretty invasive, but advertisers will tell you it allows them to give you a customized experience; to satisfy your searching and purchasing needs. And Google tells its advertisers that all that data it collects create incredible targeting capabilities, which can turn into increased sales and profits.

Why Are Browsers Ditching Cookies?

In a word, privacy.

Consider the billions of dollars lost each year because of data breaches. Or identify thefts that can take years to sort out. More than 70 percent of Americans feel like they’re being tracked online and they don’t believe the benefits outweigh the risks. Now legislation across the country and the pond are in place to do a better job at protecting individual privacy. Browsers may be changing suit because they’re being forced to.

Apple calls privacy “a fundamental human right” and has now required users to opt into tracking of their unique Identifiers for Advertisers (IDFA). It’s a 180 degree turn from the past, where you only got to opt out, and it wasn’t always that easy to do. But let’s face it, Safari is no Chrome. Google’s browser is the most widely used in the world, holding more than 65 percent of the market share. When it makes the move to kill cookies, we’ll all notice. But concerns about privacy aren’t new. The UK and EU began placing cookie restrictions on websites nearly a decade ago and the EU enacted the General Data Protection Regulation in 2018, considered to be the toughest privacy and security law in the world. In the U.S., California jumped on board with the California Consumer Privacy Act and lots of us digital marketers have already had to conform.

FLoC: Google’s Alternative Plan for 3rd Party Cookies

When Apple hit the brakes on 3rd party Cookies on Safari, advertisers left in droves and Apple dropped its ad prices by 60 percent. Google has no intention of suffering the same fate. The Federated Learning of Cohorts is Google’s answer to tracking that protects privacy while still giving advertisers enough user data to provide targeted marketing. Using a cohort assignment algorithm, users will be assigned a cohort ID, rather than an individual ID, based on their browsing history. The plan is to create cohort groups that are significantly large enough to mask individual identity, while still offering advertisers enough unique information to make effective targeting possible. Google is assuring us it will be a win-win.

When Will the Cookies Crumble?

Breathe easily for now. What started as a plan in 2019 hasn’t yet come to fruition. In 2020, Google said it would phase out 3rd party cookies within two years, but this summer it pushed the date to 2023. So, for now, time may be on your side.

But delay doesn’t mean deny. You need to pay attention and plan for the inevitability that your ad targeting is going to change. Google is assuring worried advertisers that FLoC will be the best of all worlds. From initial testing, it says that advertisers can expect to see “at least 95% of the conversions per dollar spent when compared to cookie-based advertising.” Specific results will likely vary depending on whom you target and how well the algorithm clusters users.

Most importantly for advertisers of all types, across all browsers, apps, pages, and platforms, you need to be willing to adapt. But hasn’t that always been the case in digital marketing?

If you want to stay ahead of the curve, you need a digital marketing agency that pays attention to what’s going on and always has a plan to handle what’s coming next. At CloudControlMedia, we love a good puzzle. Let us figure out yours. Contact us today.

by: Linda Emma, Head of Marketing, CloudControlMedia, LLC

Is Your Digital Marketing Agency Hiding Your Data?

Christopher N. Roberts on September 8, 2021

Does it seem like your digital marketing agency is hiding your data from you? They may not be doing it intentionally, but if they can’t connect an action and spend to a down-funnel result, you’re not getting the results you deserve. You’re not getting down CRM (sales) funnel data associated with your channels, campaigns, and sources.

The Importance of Down Funnel Attribution

Marketing attribution allows you to accurately assign credit to a single marketing effort to measure the results it produces.

For example, if you purchase advertising on Facebook, you should be able to see how many of your prospects clicked on an ad and were interested enough to request more information. In the best scenario, you could even assign a dollar value based on the cost of your good or service to determine actual return on investment. With proper attribution and analysis, your agency should be able to pinpoint success and spend strategically so every dollar counts.

One of the most common complaints we hear from clients who switch agencies and come to work with CloudControlMedia is that they couldn’t connect their marketing investment to actual contracts, enrollments, loans, and the like. In other words, their front end spend is not tied to down funnel sales. Sure, they saw more website traffic. There were more inquiries—maybe even more sales starts. But there was no final follow-through. No new sales, contracts, enrollments. The sales numbers didn’t change significantly, and digital and offline marketing dollars were being wasted.

Does This Sound Like You?

Your marketing dollars are spread across platforms and your agency refers to brand lift and increased inquiries, but when you ask for specifics, it’s nothing but crickets.

You see reports and data that indicate a reasonable cost-per-inquiry, but those inquiries aren’t converting, or you don’t know what is working and what isn’t, and much of the information doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to you. The good news is that it doesn’t necessarily mean that your marketing efforts aren’t yielding any results. But the bad news is that if you don’t know what’s working and what’s not, you won’t be able to make sound financial decisions or plan your marketing budget.

Maybe your current agency doesn’t know how to tie front end (Google, Facebook, 3rd party affiliate, organic, etc.) inquiries and spend to down funnel performance. Maybe they don’t have a system or method to make heads or tails of the data. Or maybe the data would show poor sales results from their efforts and mean a trimmed media budget. They definitely don’t want that!

So, either your agency knows what platforms are performing well and where you’re seeing the best bang for the buck and is just not sharing the info. Or much worse (and quite likely), they really don’t know enough about efforts, results, and attribution to definitively say what’s working and what’s not.

CCM and our software, the CloudControlMedia Platform (CCMP) approach your spend like we’d manage a financial portfolio. We choose individual investments based on what is working, what’s trending, and ultimately, what will yield highest sales for you.

Of note, buying media tends to be the easier part of the equation. Getting to an effective cost-per-inquiry or increasing volume willy-nilly isn’t rocket science. However, combining front end pacing and early performance coupled with managing and calibrating media spend to CRM down-funnel data in real time takes years of know-how and robust technology. CCM invested millions of dollars, enlisted the brainpower of dozens of skilled engineers, and took several years to perfect CCMP. We utilize this technology and methodology for all of our clients.

Want to learn more? Check out the CCMP demo video.

Do you want to know more about down funnel sales attribution and why so many of our clients breathe a sigh of relief when they finally sign on at CCM? Give us a call right now and we’ll answer any questions you have—even those you might not think to ask.

by: Christopher N. Roberts, COO, CloudControlMedia, LLC

Christopher N. Roberts is CloudControlMedia’s COO and a long time dot com and digital media marketer working for clients large and small over many practice areas.

10 Important Website Metrics to Measure

Linda Emma on March 3, 2021

Whether you pull up your sleeves and dive into Google Analytics, have a handy dashboard that parses data down to their core, or rely fully on an outside agency to interpret data for you, you probably understand one critical point: data matter. They are the brains of digital marketing and why it can be so effective for conversions and sales. But there are so many data points to consider, it’s often difficult to decide which metrics matter to you. If you use digital marketing to improve customer acquisition, these are the website metrics you must use to measure success:

1) Website Sessions

A mere increase in traffic to your site can be a vanity metric if that traffic isn’t tied directly to an action you took to achieve it. After all, you can have a spike in traffic that comes from developers in India and that will have no bearing whatsoever on future sales. On the other hand, if you built a marketing campaign that targets prospects with the goal of having them come to your site—and it works—that’s a metric worth noting.

2) Website Conversions

More important than mere traffic are conversions that occur once users come to you site. Are they taking the action you encouraged them to? Thanks to digital marketing metrics, you can set multiple conversion points. You might, for example, choose conversions such as a request for more information, brochure download, or the start of a sales cart. You can also create lead scoring to rank conversion actions on a path to sales. Then, those metrics can be used to create even more metrics.

3) Conversion Rate

Your conversion rate is the total number of conversions divided by sessions over a given time period. While conversions are important, your conversion rate can be even more telling. That’s because you can dive into the metric to see which campaign or channel is truly producing the best results. For example, let’s say you run a paid media campaign that brings 5000 sessions to your site that then result in 50 conversions. That’s a 1 percent conversion rate. Over the same time period, you also run an email campaign that brings only 1000 sessions to your site, but it results in that same 50 conversions. If you do the math, you see it has a 5 percent conversion rate. And when you consider the costs of paid media verses email marketing, the ROI of email easily wins in this example.

4) Cost per Clicks and Conversions

The ads you run through search or on a social media platform like Facebook often only cost you when someone clicks on the ad. Those costs are determined by a combination of factors including the bid you set, the competition at the very moment of the click, and your quality score. Obviously, the lower the cost, the better. Same goes for cost per conversion. Pay attention to both of these measurements and use conversion rate optimization to continually improve on even good results.

5) Bounce Rate

Your bounce rate for a pay-per-click campaign means a user comes to your landing page and takes no action; they don’t convert. It’s important to pay attention to your bounce rate as it can impact your quality score and force you to bid higher for your ads.

With organic traffic to your website, bounce rate is a little more complicated. The definition is essentially the same. A user comes to a page, takes no measurable action, and interacts with no other page on your site. Google considers that a bounce. However, in the case of a blog, the user may have come, read the post, and exited. It’s still considered a bounce even though the action you may have wanted was exactly what the user did: read the post.

6) Average Time on Page

Just like it sounds, time on page is how long a user spends on an individual page. It’s easy to see now that you’ll be combining data to build a true picture of what’s going on with your site and landing pages. In the organic example above, if a user “bounced” from your site after five minutes, you can infer that they actually read the post. On the other hand, if they bounced after a few seconds, your content likely didn’t appeal to the user.

7) Website Traffic by Sources

Where your traffic comes from is critical knowledge if you want to make the most of your marketing budget. Through analytics you can determine which sources are producing results and adjust your campaigns accordingly. For example, if you note that you receive considerable traffic from paid Facebook ads, but users don’t convert (think conversion rate), but you see traffic and conversions from LinkedIn, you’ll likely want to shift your marketing spend.

8) Mobile vs Desktop Traffic

You can see whether users are coming to you by desktop, mobile or tablet. Why does that matter? When you understand your users’ viewing habits, you can build better content. Since Google’s mobile-first initiative, you surely already use responsive design. However, if most of your users view your pages on their phones, you’ll want to be extremely concise in your copy. What do you offer potential customers? What do you want users to learn from an interaction with your company? What’s your call-to-action? Get to the point—quickly.

9) Website Traffic by Hour and Day

Similarly to understanding how users view your pages, when they view also matters. Especially with regard to your paid media budget, you don’t want to waste spend on times of the day or days of the week when users are unlikely to view your content or take action. And in some industries, you’ll also want to account for seasonality.

10) Cost per Acquisition

The end goal of your marketing efforts is to get qualified users to purchase your products or services. Link your marketing efforts to the efforts of your sales team so you understand the profile of the customers most likely to purchase —and the marketing path they took to get there. What was your investment and what’s your bottom-line marketing ROI?

 

Believe it or not these 10 metrics are only a small sampling of what you can examine when it comes to digital marketing metrics. It’s complicated! That’s why you need a digital marketing agency that has cutting-edge tools and the data scientists who make sense of it all. At CloudControlMedia, our experts in digital marketing have a long track record of success. And with the powerful CCMP platform, we can compile, analyze, and interpret the metrics, to always optimize for results. Contact us today for a free CCMP demo.

~Linda Emma

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