Don’t Measure Your Marketing Success By An Impression Metric

If you’re using impressions as your main KPI to either measure the success of a campaign or to pay an agency for obtaining them for you, you’re not being smart. I realize I may have just insulted a lot of people, but as a marketer you need to know how it really works in the digital space.

I’ve seen several traditional agencies who are used to reporting on offline campaigns and several influencer agencies who use impressions (or it’s ugly KPI cousin REACH) as their primary metric. They’ll tell you that your campaign will generate 10 million impressions but not how many verifiable views or clicks the content is generating.

Don’t fall for this nonsense.

Here’s what you should do:

1. Count the number of unique mentions about your brand or product on social media channels – we use simply measured, but there are a lot of tools you can use to handle this.

2. Every campaign should have a CTA and use unique, trackable links with all content to determine its effectiveness especially with influencers.

3. Conversions are what’s critical and every campaign should be able to measure conversions – whether it’s a lead, a sale, a download or an email capture, conversions should be your primary metric in 90% of digital marketing.

In sum, Reporting on impressions reinforces the idea that if you show an ad enough times, we’ll just have to give in to the message. And we all know that isn’t true.

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Don’t miss this one! “Ep 7: How to Get 70 Million Views on Facebook”

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