What are meaningful advertising metrics?

The world is obsessed with metrics and tracking performance online. Time and time again, we as marketers and the greater digital world, refer back to Clicks and Click-through-rates as performance metrics but why?

What does a click through mean?

There are several metrics that are focused on from an advertising stance. Items like Impressions/Views, clicks and conversions. An impression is easily the most overlooked item in a digital advertisers arsenal. It relates to the number of times it is seen, or not (most impressions just need to be loaded - viewability doesn’t always come into account). An impression or a view though equates to branding and awareness. Both are needed to build an identity around your business or around a certain market. There is value in a brand (Forbes even has a list for it!). Let’s skip one and jump now to conversions. Conversion optimization is also wildly valuable. It lets you know exactly how much it costs in advertising to reach a conversion that is beneficial to your company. There are a few downsides to conversion optimization. The first is that a conversion does not always have to be monetary in value but to determine ROI, it likely has to defined in costs and profits. Also, it has to be trackable and for automated optimization to really work the conversions have to be tracked in real-time. Sorry, but manually uploading conversions at a later date does not always suffice for optimization. Sure it’s great for tracking but not for making your campaigns better in real-time. So these conversions need to be tied to a digital platform and set up appropriately. This requires time and effort, and often times other teams, so it goes overlooked. Generally speaking, the industry uses a click as a base metric for action and engagement and this is easily the most used metric in the industry - but is it really useful?