From clicks to conversions: Mastering ad effectiveness metrics

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.”

- John Wanamaker

While more consumers are spending time on social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram, TV is not a dying advertising medium. 

40% of people say they’ve seen advertising they trusted on TV. Based on research from Statista, TV ranks as the most trusted medium out of the ten surveyed — with consumers placing nearly the amount of trust in TV ads as they do in social media.

But how do you create successful ads? And how do you measure their effectiveness? And why does this matter now? To start, according to a study by Gartner, 83% of CMOs prioritize ROI accountability today.

As a since-deleted Reddit user notes, the answers to these questions aren’t clear cut: 

“All sorts of different objectives and metrics used and consistent debate about which ones are the best, most accurate, most useful.”

In this post, I’ll show you how to measure the effectiveness of your advertising, take a critical look at the most commonly-used metrics and walk you through our tried-and-tested advertising effectiveness formula.

“Every single element in an advertisement – headline, subhead, photo, and copy – must be put there not because it looks good, not because it sounds good, but because testing has shown that it works best!”

– John Caples

Advertising effectiveness measures the performance of an ad compared to the campaign’s goals and ow ads meet goals (think: sales, brand lift, engagement). But as there are different types of goals, there are different definitions of "effective." For instance, some of the goals advertising effectiveness impacts can also include relevance, audience sentiment and brand awareness. 

For many brands, effective ads are ads that directly impact ROI, specific business outcomes and lead to net new sales and thousands of online brand mentions. While the majority of companies also track long-term, hard-to-pin-down metrics such as brand awareness and likability. 

Ad effectiveness formulas essentially answer the question: Are my ads doing what I want them to do? They help you identify whether your ads have hit the metrics you intended after they’ve aired. 

Measuring advertising effectiveness is crucial for brands and businesses that want to optimize their marketing strategies and achieve a significant ROI. 

By evaluating how well advertising campaigns perform, companies can identify which elements resonate most with their target consumer, allowing them to optimize their messages and improve future campaigns. 

Without these consumer insights, businesses risk wasting resources on ineffective advertising and missing out on potential customer engagement. And in a competitive market, understanding what works and what doesn't is critical for maintaining an edge.

“Never stop testing, and your advertising will never stop improving.”

- David Ogilvy

Before we dive into how to measure advertising effectiveness, it's important to call out that your goals and KPIs should be set before you begin. This should include:

• Setting SMART goals: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound

• Choosing KPIs: Whether it be awareness (impressions, brand recall), engagement (CTR) or conversions (CPA, ROAS).

Now let's get into how to measure the effectiveness.

As ads appeal to human psychology, many of the concepts we use to measure ad effectiveness could be described as “fluffy,” difficult to quantify and nuanced. Notions such as how likable a brand is or how much trust we have in a product may be difficult to measure because they depend on human emotion, bias and impulse. However, there is a formula and a step-by-step process you can follow to bring a bit of scientific accuracy to the creative process. 

Advertising effectiveness formula

Pilot Media Inc. senior researcher Adam S. Cook developed a formula for measuring advertising effectiveness with a single numerical value. He calls it the OB-AEI. 

It takes into account metrics like ad recall and desired outcome (for example, sales) to come up with an index that can be used to compare the effectiveness of one ad to another.

It looks complicated on the surface, but its parts are simple: conduct a survey with a representative sample, pull your sales numbers, and crunch the numbers.

Key metrics to measure ad effectiveness

Here's some metrics you may find helpful:

• Financial metrics: ROI, ROAS

• Conversion metrics: Conversion Rate, CPA, CLV

• Engagement metrics: CTR benchmarks

• Awareness metrics: Facebook Brand Lift, Google Search Console for branded search spikes

Measuring ad performance goes well beyond just checking click-through rates. To truly understand effectiveness, marketers need to dig deeper into what the data is telling them and act on it.

Start by diagnosing the disconnects. For example, a high click-through rate (CTR) but low conversions might point to issues with your landing page experience. Wordstream’s guide to landing page optimization suggests reviewing page speed, message match, and call-to-action clarity to close the gap between interest and action.

Next, dive into your audience data. Social platforms like Sprout Social offer robust demographic breakdowns to help segment your audience based on behavior, interests, and engagement. This kind of segmentation can uncover surprising differences in how various groups interact with your ads—and inform more tailored creative and targeting strategies.

Finally, optimize budget allocation by tracking cost-per-acquisition (CPA) and return on ad spend (ROAS) over time. Identify what’s working and what’s not, then reallocate funds toward the highest-performing channels and audiences. A data-driven media mix is key to unlocking efficiency at scale.

Even with the best data, marketers still run into some common and evolving challenges when it comes to understanding ad effectiveness.

• Attribution remains a top concern. In fact, 47% of marketers report struggling with multi-channel attribution, according to Salesforce. When conversions happen across devices or platforms, it’s difficult to credit the right touchpoint. Using unified measurement tools and adopting models like data-driven attribution can help make sense of the chaos.

• Data privacy is another hurdle. With changes like Google’s Privacy Sandbox and Apple’s iOS 17 privacy updates, traditional tracking methods are getting phased out. Marketers need to adapt by investing in first-party data strategies and contextual targeting while staying compliant with evolving regulations.

• Brand impact also takes time. According to the Gartner CMO Spend Survey, brand campaigns often take 6–12 months to show measurable results, much longer than performance campaigns. This delay can lead to premature budget cuts if expectations aren’t aligned upfront. Setting long-term KPIs for brand-building is crucial.

• Data overload is real. With so many metrics available, it’s easy to lose focus. HubSpot’s KPI framework recommends choosing a handful of “north star” metrics (like customer lifetime value or ROAS) to keep teams aligned on what really matters.

Ad measurement is rapidly evolving, with new tools and techniques offering smarter, faster insights.

AI-powered analytics are becoming table stakes. Tools like Salesforce Einstein and Google’s Predictive Audiences use machine learning to forecast which users are most likely to convert, allowing for more targeted and cost-effective campaigns.

Attention metrics are also gaining traction. Instead of just measuring impressions, platforms like Lumen Research and Adelaide are helping brands understand how much attention an ad actually captures—bridging the gap between visibility and impact.

Data clean rooms are on the rise, too. Solutions like Amazon Marketing Cloud and Meta’s Advanced Analytics allow brands to safely analyze performance across walled gardens using anonymized, aggregated data. This helps unlock more insights without compromising privacy.

And finally, incrementality testing is becoming a must-have. Rather than relying solely on attribution models, marketers are using controlled experiments—like those offered by Google Ads Incrementality Experiments—to prove which ad dollars are actually driving new results.

Let’s take a look at how some brands have measured advertising effectiveness and how they are applying advertising effectiveness learnings.

Cheetos: Creative testing with Zappi Amplify TV 

With tools like Zappi, you don’t have to wait until your ad goes live to measure its effectiveness. You can (and should) measure ad effectiveness in the development stage by testing different variations of your ad. 

Cheetos used Zappi Amplify TV to test different variations of their award-winning Super Bowl ad featuring their new product: Cheetos Popcorn mix. 

Read our customer story snippet below to see how Cheetos used Zappi Amplify TV for early-stage ad variation testing — highlighting the ads potential effectiveness: 

“The Cheetos team opted to work with American rapper MC Hammer and used his iconic phrase "can't touch this." 

The ad would feature a series of vignettes of a man unable to touch anything because of the Cheetos dust on his fingers. They developed four alternative animatic ads to test out a few different ways of bringing the story to life.

They experimented with different creative elements and vignettes to find the right balance of humor, relevance and absurdity to resonate and make the ad stand out.

Two key metrics showed the overall potential of the idea for success. The four ads came in the top third of all ads tested for their ability to drive immediate sales, and their potential to drive longer term impact on the Cheetos brand was even more incredible.”

Through their tests with Amplify, Cheetos quickly identified a clear winner in terms of engagement, humor, cultural sensitivity and ad appreciation. They then used Amplify to analyze viewer sentiment in greater detail — tracking emoji responses to different sections of the ad and leaning into the ads more humorous and emotive creative elements. 

Coca-Cola: Build effective cross-media campaigns 

You can use ad effectiveness insights to understand how TV ads drive consumers' digital behaviors, from social media mentions to app downloads. In doing so, you can understand how TV ads work with your other advertising channels — giving you a look at their combined impact on your campaigns. 

Research shows that cross-media campaigns, in which ads are shown across TV, internet and mobile, have a bigger impact on message, ad and brand credibility than those shared on just one platform. 

You can use these insights to improve your TV and digital synergy by including a unique CTA to a targeted landing page or using ad retargeting directed towards consumers who've watched your ads online.

A great example of this is Coca-Cola’s Share a Coke campaign. This campaign featured both TV and social media ads, promoting personalized coke bottles for coke fans to share with their friends and family. 

The hashtag #ShareaCoke sparked the creation of millions of pieces of user-generated content as consumers shared pictures of themselves with friends and family drinking from their personalized coke bottles across social media. The multi-media campaign led to an 11% increase in sales. 

Here are some general tools to help you get started:

• Analytics: Google Analytics 4 (GA4), Adobe Analytics (Google’s GA4 migration guide).

• Tracking: Facebook Pixel, Google Tag Manager (Meta Business Help Center, Google Support).

• Attribution Models: Google Ads Data-Driven Attribution (Think with Google, 2025).

• A/B Testing: Facebook Split Tests, Google Ads Experiments (Meta Ads Library, Google Ads Help).

• Surveys: Google Surveys, YouTube Brand Lift (Google Marketing Platform).

• MMM: Nielsen’s Marketing Mix Modeling guide.

If you’re looking to gain a greater understanding of how your target consumer thinks and feels about your brand, product or service, Zappi’s Amplify ad system is a fantastic solution. 

Offering much more than another ad pre-testing solution, Zappi Amplify ad system is the only agile market research platform that creates a learning loop, making you smarter the more you use it. By researching your ads early on in the development process with Zappi, you’ll get the insights you need to make it better, and then use all the insights you’ve collected over time to make your future ad campaigns even more successful with the knowledge of what works and what doesn’t.

With second-by-second emotional responses, in-context and forced exposure, system 1 emojis and AI-based theming for likes, dislikes and distinctive brand assets, our ad system helps you dive even deeper into consumer behavior to optimize your ads for success. 

“Since partnering with Zappi, we have seen our creative effectiveness improve by almost a third across all our advertising. This equates to PepsiCo gaining hundreds of millions in value from greater creative effectiveness this year!”

- Stephen Gans, SVP chief consumer insights and analytics officer, Pepsico

And because our learning loop makes it that much easier to research early and often, you’re able to optimize faster, validate better and leverage systematic learnings to seamlessly create more effective advertising. 

If you’d like to learn more, check out how Zappi helped PepsiCo improve their creative effectiveness by 30% below. Or if you’d like to talk to us about the Amplify ad system, reach out to us.

While there is a ton of debate around the best ways to measure ad effectiveness — you can test the power of your ads by combining several metrics that are most important to your brand and tracking them over time. To give your ad campaigns the best chance of succeeding, it’s important to also test them with consumers during the development phase, through to production.