10 Paid Media KPIs That You Should Be Tracking In 2023

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There are a number of paid media KPIs that you should be tracking in 2022 to ensure the success of your campaigns.

The most important KPIs vary depending on the buying type, campaign type, business-related goals and objectives for running the campaign as well as obtainable averages in your industry. 

Irrespective of the differences in PPC types and campaign goals, certain metrics remain important and consistent across industries and goals that are useful for tracking progress with Paid Media campaigns.

Interestingly, Porter Metrics can help you quickly track, report, and visualize all that data right now. If holding a report at hand is something you are looking for at the moment to probably present in a meeting, please schedule a call with Porter Metrics Support Here.

Let’s help you create that report right away.

What are KPIs?

A Key Performance Indicator (KPI) is a measure used to evaluate a paid media campaign’s performance against its strategic objectives. KPIs help simplify performance tracking by reducing a large number of measures into a manageable number of ‘key’ indicators.

KPIs can be used to track the operational performance of departments, projects or individuals against targets or goals. They can provide management with insight and decision-making tools.

Why are KPIs important?

Quantifiable measurements, known as key performance indicators (KPIs) are used to assess a paid media campaign’s long-term success. By evaluating strategic, financial, and operational achievements against others in the same business, KPIs provide insights into a company’s overall performance.

Key performance indicators (KPIs) are an important part of the data needed to explain and make decisions around how a business or campaign will progress to meet its business and marketing goals.

KPIs are essential and in place to help leaders steer their company towards the right direction.

How do you choose your Paid Media KPIs?

Choosing your paid media kpis shouldn’t be as hard as rocket science. There is a process in place which we will share with you.

So first of all, you want to ask questions that will return answers that contain elements showing that your campaign of business is making progress. For instance, you can ask – how many leads I have gotten so far from this advert.

This question aims to bring back results showing if there is really any prospects you have been able to secure just from running this ad.

A lead is a potential client which you are now interested in seeing. Now that you have a question, in this case, a conversion-focused question, you can then proceed to find answers to this question by digging through data from the ads you ran or may be currently running.

If you don’t know how to answer this question, you can let our experienced expert show you how its done by scheduling a call right here. This way we can quickly show you how its done and then create a report for you as well.

Why is it important to analyze Paid Media KPIs?

Paid media key performance indicators (KPIs) are essential metrics to monitor and measure if a marketing agency or ad campaign manager is interested in growing business for their clients.

Round the clock, audiences and business prospects are always providing feedbacks to marketing campaigns and responding to sponsored brand contents on the web. This feedback or responses are often buried in a lot of data.

It’ll then take an experienced manager or agency to sieve through, filter and unearth the report so that business owners can make sense of everything their audience is saying.

From our experience, there isn’t a better way to quickly communicate this customer feedback than through a beautiful and visually appealing report that you’ll be able to understand at a glance.

This is why Porter Metric remains your fastest and most trusted paid media reporting tool. Our reports are built specially and in place to give you all you need to scale performance and conversions in under seconds.

You can create your own report here or schedule a session with our experts to help you set up a report so you can understand how your businesses are doing.

Quickly measure how your paid or ad campaign is performing. The reports you will get at the end of it will help you track if you’re meeting—or exceeding—your goals so that you can plan your next moves.

Top Paid Media KPIs to track

1. Cost per click (CPC)

It’s crucial to get a good cost per click (CPC) value on your click-to-adverts. A cost per click is a way to estimate the amount of money a website will charge “based on the amount of times a visitor clicks on ads,” as Investopedia defines it (thanks, Investopedia!).

While it seems simple on the surface, this metric provides valuable insight into areas that need future improvement and expansion. We’ll walk you through how to calculate this metric, interpret it in your industry, and use it in your current platforms.

You can calculate the cost in line with click on (CPC) by way of dividing overall advertising price with the aid of the wide variety of clicks.

CPC can be assessed for diverse time-periods (i.E. Day, week, month, year) and in case your marketing charges are tied to certain merchandise or campaigns, you could assign a specific CPC for every.

2. Click-through rate (CTR)

Click through rate (CTR) is a metric in digital advertising and marketing that refers to the share of human beings touring a web page from an advert or organic web source.

CTR is the percentage number of clicks that your ad receives divided by the number of times your ad is shown: clicks ÷ impressions = CTR.

For example, if you had 10 clicks and 200 impressions, then your CTR would be 5%. Clickthrough rate (CTR) can be used to measure the effectiveness of keywords, ads and free listings.

When someone clicks on an advertisement, it takes them to a web page for that product or service. CTR measures an ad’s success in capturing a site visitor’s interest.

A high click-through rate indicates a successful ranking page on your website or ad in a Google SERP (search engine results page).

This means that your website is generating more traffic per impressions on Google. A high click-through rate can also indicate increased conversions, depending on the landing page user experience.

3. Conversion rate

A conversion rate is a measure of how many people take a desired action, such as clicking on an advertisement. It is calculated by dividing the number of people who convert by the total size of the audience, and then converting that figure into a percentage.

For example, if an advertiser runs a mobile ad campaign on Facebook that reaches an audience of 10,000 people, and 700 of those people click on the ad, the conversion rate would be 7%

700/10000 = 0.07, or a 7% conversion rate

At 7% conversion rate, a PPC specialist is now equipped with a metric with which they can improve.

4. Cost per acquisition (CPA)

Cost per acquisition (CPA) is a key marketing metric that measures the total cost of acquiring a new customer. In other words, CPA indicates how much it costs to get a single customer down your sales funnel, from the first touch point to ultimate conversion.

CPA is a vital measurement of marketing success, generally distinguished from Cost of Acquiring Customer (CAC) by its granular application.

By understanding your CPA, you can optimize your marketing campaigns and channels to acquire new customers in the most cost-effective way possible.

CPA is calculated by dividing the total ad spend or campaign cost by conversion.

5. Return on investment (ROI)

Return On Investment in advertising or marketing is the profit you earn from investing in marketing. When you calculate ROI for advertising, you ascribe revenue growth to certain advertising and marketing campaigns or strategies you executed and invested in.

By calculating ROI in marketing, you can see how your marketing campaigns contribute to your business’s growth. When you calculate your marketing ROI, you’ll be able to see what digital marketing strategies work for your business.

This information can help you revamp campaigns to drive better results. Calculating marketing ROI helps you determine where to invest your budget.

You can calculate ROI by subtracting cost of the campaign from the total sales outcome divided by 100. So, if sales grow by $5,000 and the marketing campaign costs $500, then the simple ROI is 900%. (($1000-$100) / $100) = 900%.

6. Impressions

An impression (or view) is seen as one display of online content to a user’s internet-enabled device. Impressions are defined as the total number of times your content was displayed, whether it was clicked on or not. Each display counts as a single impression.

Counting impressions can be a little complicated in that one may not be too such if duplicate views, interactions from bots, or if impressions were counted.

However, an impression is one of the key metric a competent digital marketing agency or specialist must keep track of when measuring the success of a digital marketing campaign.

Ad impressions are great because they help businesses measures how often ads are served for the search terms triggered by prospects.

PPC specialists or advertising agencies who crave wider reach, brand awareness and recognition should be looking to improve upon their impression metric as it shows the number of times their advert was served.

7. Reach

Reach refers to the sum total of people in a target audience who have been exposed to a single ad served. Ideally, reach has no bearing on the effectiveness of the ad on the consumer.

It is rather an essential KPI for assigning a number or a percentage to show the total number of a targeted audience that has now been shown the ad.

That way, a campaign manager can quantify interested folks who have seen his/her advert. The reach metric does not increase when an ad is served to a person twice.

The frequency metric however handles the counting and display of data showing the number of times an ad reached a single person within the audience.

Reach is calculated by dividing Impressions by Frequency. It is ideally an average of the total reach over the course of the life of an ad campaign.

8. Engagement

Engagement is an important paid media KPI that must be monitored during and after a campaign. It is often visualized as a percentage rate showing how consumers interact directly with a brand through actions such as clicks, likes, saves, comments, and shares.

Interactions otherwise known as engagement, happens across the web and is measured quite differently across each web asset. In social media marketing campaigns, social media engagement rates are all about saves, likes, clicks, comments, shares, and more.

Some platforms count downloads, follows, and time on the page as part of engagements and interactions. It is essential you track engagement metrics on your paid media campaigns because it allows you to analyze the effectiveness of your advertising campaign.

A high engagement rate reflects a positive tick on the brand loyalty lane. Brand loyalty also implies repeat business which positively reflects on your revenue and bottom-line numbers.

A low engagement rate on the other hand, implies that either the content, the brand or the ad campaign needs a rework.

In cases where the ad isn’t converting, and the targeted audience has been gracious enough to give feedback in the form of comments, dislike emojis, and the rest, a great campaign manager will have to analyze the campaign to identify the problem so he/she can provide a lasting solution to the problem.

Tracking engagement rate is a fantastic way to determine the audience’s interest in your brand, products and services. To calculate the real engagement rate of a post, you can use the following formula: the number of interactions divided by actual reach and multiplied by 100

9. Social Media Shares

Social sharing describes when social media users distribute Web content on a social network to their specific connections, groups or individuals.

In a paid media setting, view social shares as an organic boost to your already viral paid campaign. It adds trust, authenticity, and communal acceptance to your content and campaign.

As explained by BigCommerce, when social connections —including friends, family, and coworkers — see shared content, it resonates more than a message displayed directly by a business.

Social media shares are vital angles of an aspect of paid media campaigns because they boost your reach, conversions and growth.

10. Frequency

Frequency revolves around the number of times an individual is exposed to a specific advert during an advertising campaign. It is an essential KPI to be tracked because it allows the campaign manager understand how many users would on the average recall their brand, logo or content when shown.

Doubling down on the Frequency KPI is also essential if and when a campaign manager is interested in keeping the brand, product and service top on the minds of the campaign’s targeted audience.

Increasing your ad’s frequency advances both high-quality engagement and the fact that viewers may have had multiple interactions and opportunities to convert from several exposures to the same ad.

Track your Paid Media KPIs with Porter

It usually takes effort and thought to string together a report showing essential paid media kpis. This is why you want to take advantage of Porter Metric’s bank of over 80+ ready-made report templates designed to give you instant reports so you see metrics you’ll need to watch to grow your business.

Interestingly, Porter Metrics have made it so easy so much so that you can easily use Google Data Studio Connectors to connect your Facebook Page, Ads Account, IG page, LinkedIn Page and Ad account as well as Shopify, Mailchimp and other third-party interfaces you’d like to generate reports to show performance.

Benefits of using Porter Metric to track your Paid Media KPIs

  • Porter Metric offers a fast and reliable no-code reporting tool for marketers. There’s a round the clock support team ready to help you quickly generate a report from your ad account or social media page. You just schedule a call here and its done in 3 steps like ABC.
  • We are the cheapest and friendliest data reporting tool provider that lets you access more than 600+ conversion focused and highly investor/client persuasive templates
  • We provide white label and customizable reports which means you can change everything you want and can even replace our logo with yours. I mean we can do that for you during our support session here as well.
Paid Media KPIs-Porter Metric Data Studio Report

Conclusion

In a nutshell, the Top 10 Paid Media KPI’s to track in 2022 include –

1. Cost per click (CPC) 2. Click-through rate (CTR) 3. Conversion rate 4. Cost per acquisition (CPA) 5. Return on investment (ROI) 6. Impressions 7. Reach 8. Engagement 9. Social Media Shares 10. Frequency.

These timeless paid media KPIs that are essential to help you grow your business and maximize your ROI are already organized and available on our ready-made templates. If you need your reports ready like yesterday, here’s where you can get it done as fast as possible.

Extra Paid Media KPIs You Want To Track In 2022

Here are three more important paid media kpis you may want to track in 2022 if you are super critical about every other moving part that moves the money needles.

1. Clicks

Clicks happen when your ad unit or creative interests your targeted prospects enough to inspire them to take action. As a whole, experts define this metric as the total number of times your ad was clicked

When a click happens, another key metric known as Click-through rate is triggered which ultimately adds to your conversion metrics.

Clicks usually follow with the user being taken to your landing page for more information or to take further action.

2. Cost Per Measure (CPM)

Another key metric to look out for is the cost per thousand metric which refers to the cost of 1,000 advertisement impressions on one web page.

In the case of a $5 CPM, an advertiser will have to pay $5 for every 1,000 impressions of its advertisement. 

This simply measured thus

(Total Ad Spend) ÷ (Total Measured Impressions) X 1000 

=

Cost Per Click

3. FOLLOWERS

This metric doesn’t always apply for campaigns that aren’t social media specific but for social media advertising, usually for Page visits, brand awareness, reach, engagement and the likes, the follower metric is an essential conversion metric to track if you are really looking to grow your community.

A brand that is interested in keeping an active community may want to be super keen on providing value to their followers, running paid ad for this and tracking this metric to ensure that it grows consistently.

4. MENTIONS

Mentions according to industry experts are the number of times a user or any other business account tags you in their posts, comments, or stories are called mentions.

Mentions although organic could sometimes be an essential paid media KPI you want to monitor and track to keep tabs on how viral you are becoming. A number of mentions especially by an influencer or a celebrity can quickly boost your social media page’s followership and engagement rate.

We trust that these extras are going to be extremely useful for your campaigns and if you require further clarifications or want to understand how these metrics work and how you can have a one pager report that shows you these metrics in a page, then you can quickly do the following

First, you can do it yourself now with our ready-made templates. Just visit Portermetrics and click on make a report. Then follow the prompts and your report will be ready in just a minute

Or

You can schedule a call with Porter Metrics Support to guide you through the process or for support to generate a quick report for you immediately.

To a greater you Cheers!!!