Basic marketing metrics and what they mean

As a marketer you mostly have been asked (or will be) to define and report KPIS on your ad campaigns. 

If you are new to marketing or a non-marketer trying to make sense of these terms and acronyms here’s some key terms you need to know. 

Impressions

• This is how many times your ad has been seen. They may have seen it once or multiple times by the same person, but can often gets confused with Reach. Most often impression numbers will be higher than reach as you account for people seeing your ad multiple times. 

Reach

• This is how many individual people your ad has reached. Not to be confused with how many times a person has seen it. These are unique individuals it has reached. 

Click through rate (CTR) 

• This is commonly your engagement metric. It is the percentage of times your ad was seen and how many times it was actually clicked on. A good CTR benchmark is dependent on your ad platform (I will share more about ad benchmarks in another article)

• Your formula for calculating is [clicks/impressions] x 100 = CTR.

• Eg. [100 clicks/1000 impressions x 100] = 10% CTR

Conversion Rate 

• This is how many people who clicked on your ad, performed your goal action and is typically associated with Sign-ups, Downloads, Registration completions and other Lead Generation tactics.

• Your formula for calculating is total number of [conversions/total number of clicks] x 100 = Conversion Rate 

• Eg. [100 conversions/3000 clicks] x 100 = 3.33% Conversion rate

These are some basic terms for now but in future articles I will elaborate on these more. Stay tuned for much more on marketing metrics. Is there a term you want to understand better or just want to chat about metrics? Shoot me a message and I’m happy to chat.