Media Metrics Matter. But Do You Know How to Tell The Whole Story?

Measuring success is easier said than done when it comes to paid media. There’s no silver bullet, no single key performance indicator (KPI), that demonstrates success.

The best paid media campaigns use a variety of channels, tools, and corresponding metrics to create a holistic campaign ecosystem. Analyzing each media channel and each asset individually and then bringing all the pieces together reveals the whole story — and helps drive effective marketing decisions.

Each media channel works differently.

Impressions, shares, clicks, downloads. Which one really shows a campaign’s success? It can be challenging to identify your KPIs because almost nothing is measured the same way. It comes down to aligning the tool to the task. You wouldn’t use a ruler to measure time. You also wouldn’t use click-through rate to measure the success of a video that isn’t clickable.

Off Madison Ave collaborates with our clients to identify what indicates success to us and to them, and then we assign KPIs accordingly. We explain what each media channel can do to help our clients understand KPIs based on channel, creative execution, or ad type. We do the work to examine the channel where the creative runs and align it with the correct KPI.

The media ecosystem tells the whole story.

Assigning appropriate KPIs to each media channel allows you to understand your campaign’s success. You can see how well a single asset performs while also understanding how it pairs with other items and impacts the greater media ecosystem. It allows you to analyze each channel’s performance based on what makes sense for that channel and your goals.

A combination of measurements produces the most reliable feedback on how each component supports another and contributes to the overall paid media campaign. For example, you may have a paid digital campaign running alongside a search campaign when a PR story gets picked up in the news. Appropriate KPIs and relevant metrics reveal how these pieces fit together. Did you see more website clicks? Was there a boost in people searching for you when the news story aired? You have to be able to narrow in on the individual KPIs while also zooming out to view the whole media picture.

At Off Madison Ave, we plan and report on paid media campaigns collectively. Our team knows the intricacies of each media channel and understands what’s happening with campaigns from a higher, holistic viewpoint. We don’t let individual media channels become siloed or focus too heavily on one metric. We measure all of the individual media goals and their respective indicators, and then we use those pieces to reveal the whole story — how all the players in the media ecosystem work together. Then we provide that analysis to our clients to demonstrate how the media goals align with their overall business goals.

Client collaboration and communication are key.

Our clients come to us with a business goal: increase brand awareness, increase visitation, or boost sales to name a few.

Many of our media KPIs are indicators that steer the campaign toward the client’s overall business goal, but individually they do not directly correlate to the client’s business goal. We monitor the individual metrics to make sure we’re on the right track, and we work collaboratively and transparently with our clients to set up paid media KPIs that make sense to them. It’s called the “through story,” and it’s how we tie media KPIs to actual impact on our clients’ business goals.

We also have a continual feedback loop from our clients that allows us to adjust on the fly. We can optimize in the middle of a campaign; if we see something that isn’t performing as well as we want it to, we can shift how a client splits their budget or adjust creative executions over multiple channels. We approach client relationships as partnerships and help them make the most of every dollar.

Paid media campaigns need a balance of individual success metrics and a holistic 50,000-foot view to accurately showcase the return on investment. If you are looking for a new paid media partner or if you have questions, drop us your info in the form below.