Measuring Campaign Performance | Channel Metrics and Building a Shared KPI
Published:
Last Updated:
Category: Campaign Management,
Published:
Last Updated:
Category: Campaign Management,
Authors: Shusaku Yosa
The campaign ends, you start pulling numbers, and while each channel reports its own figures, you cannot say how the whole thing performed. Social reach and email opens do not add up, and summing conversions by channel produces a total larger than the actual count. This article covers the metric design needed to evaluate a campaign across channels.
This is the first obstacle in measurement. The problem breaks into three parts.
Impressions, reach, opens, sessions. All of them count contact, but the depth they represent is different. One ad impression and someone opening an email cannot be weighted the same.
The same person sees it on social, searches for it, comes back from an email, and buys. Add up each channel's dashboard at that point and the conversion count becomes several times the reality.
Every tool is configured to show its own contribution at maximum. Not out of bad faith, but because it does not know about contact on other channels.
Search advertising converts the same day, while articles and webinars show their effect months later. Cut the reporting period at the campaign dates and the slower channels look weaker than they are.
To compare across channels, settle on one metric that means the same thing in every channel. That is the foundation of a shared KPI.
The candidates are user-side behaviours that do not depend on the channel.
Impressions and engagement rate, by contrast, cannot serve as a shared KPI, because the definitions differ between platforms.
Even with a shared KPI settled, the question of how to count someone who touched several channels remains. Three approaches exist in practice.
Assign the whole conversion to the channel immediately before it. Simple to compile, and the total matches reality.
The drawback is that the channels that created awareness show zero contribution. Keep reporting this way and only branded search and retargeting get credit, while the upstream work gets cut.
The reverse: assign the whole conversion to the channel where the person first encountered you. Useful when you want to see contribution to new acquisition.
The trade-off is that whatever closed the deal goes unrecognised.
The most workable option in practice. Build two tables, one on first-touch and one on last-touch, and read them together.
Channels ranking high in both are reliably working. High only on first touch means it opens the door; high only on last touch means it pushes people over the line. Seeing the difference in role is more useful than chasing precision in the split.
Put the shared KPI on conversions and awareness work is always at a disadvantage. Leave that unaddressed and only the easily-measured work survives.
There are two responses.
Do not put awareness work in the same table as acquisition work. Manage it separately on metrics read over time: branded search volume, direct traffic, the proportion of new visitors.
The job of awareness work is to grow the pool that later-stage work can address. Look at the addressable size for retargeting, or the net growth of the email list, and the contribution becomes traceable in numbers.
Reading it this way also makes awareness work easier to defend in budget negotiations.
However good the metric design, it means nothing if the measurement is not in place. Two things need settling before the campaign starts.
If campaign names vary across channels, you cannot gather everything belonging to the same initiative afterwards.
Settle a code that identifies the initiative and use the same one everywhere: ad campaign names, UTM parameters, email send names, social tracking links. With those four aligned, the compilation effort drops sharply.
Cutting at the campaign end date loses results for products with long consideration cycles. Decide before you start how many days after the end to include.
The guide is the historical number of days from first contact to conversion. If most fall within 30 days, including 30 days after the end is enough.
They will not. Because each tool double-counts conversions, averaging channel CPAs diverges from reality. Calculate the overall CPA separately as total spend divided by the actual conversion count, and treat channel CPAs as something for relative comparison between channels only.
Dedicated URLs, phone numbers, or coupon codes are the standard approach. Where that is not possible, asking "how did you hear about us" in a survey works. Accuracy drops, but it beats having nothing to judge with.
Narrow it to one shared KPI and at most two channel-specific metrics each. That is roughly what actually gets used in a review. If you collected numbers nobody looks at, drop them next time.
For something running about a week, last-touch alone is enough. The time from contact to conversion is short, so the effect of overlap is small. The longer a campaign runs across months, the more the first touch needs looking at too.
The main reason measurement becomes a formality is that compiling takes too long. Pull numbers out of each tool and re-key them, and by the time the report exists the next campaign has started.
Xtrategy manages campaign schedules alongside budget and KPIs on a single screen. With spend and results linked at the campaign level, preparing the review takes no time at all.
What helps most in campaign measurement is aligning the naming convention before the campaign starts. From your next initiative, begin by using the same code across every channel.
How smaller companies should choose a CRM when nobody can be assigned to it full time. Covers five criteria — setup time...
A campaign design framework built on the order of decisions rather than the order of work. Covers the six-stage dependen...
How to allocate an advertising budget, accounting for the constraints of auction-based media. Covers splitting into capt...
