Stop chasing clicks: Smarter ways to measure campaign success

Measuring how effective a CPG or QSR digital campaign is requires a multi-layered framework that accounts for performance, engagement and brand metrics. 

Understanding the available advanced measurement tools, being aware of common mistakes and considering brands doing it right can help make sure your campaign checks all the boxes for effectiveness. 

In this article, I’ll get into what marketing effectiveness is, the three layers of measurement, some examples of CPG and QSR brands who do it well and more. Let’s get into it.

"How do you know if your marketing campaigns are working?” 

- Sunil Gupta, PhD, Edward W. Carter Professor of Business Administration, co-chair Driving Digital Strategy, Harvard Business School

The answer to that question may not be as simple as it seems, and requires far more than intuition. Digital campaigns are complex and that complexity is increasing quickly, over time. All too often business goals and marketing activities don’t match up. Perhaps worst of all, it’s entirely possible to measure the wrong things and think your campaign is doing great only to find later that it was completely ineffective. 

Vanity metrics are like a fun house mirror, offering a distorted, untrustworthy view of your campaign. What brands need are actionable campaign performance metrics. 

According to this Mckinsey report:

“In our experience, a thoughtful and data-driven full-funnel marketing strategy can drive significant value. By shifting greater media allocation to areas with higher returns and employing a test-and-learn optimization for demand-generation campaigns, marketers can achieve a 15 to 20 percent lift in marketing ROI.” 

An effective digital marketing campaign is one that makes an impact and justifies the money, time and effort involved in running it. Ultimately, did the campaign achieve the objectives it was designed to reach? Generally, objectives fall into three categories: 

1. Branding

2. Performance

3. Retention

Regardless of the category, consumers tend to go through three stages of the marketing funnel: 

1. Awareness

2. Consideration

3. Decision

You first need to identify the key metrics that define success and how the campaign affects revenue. Key performance indicators (KPIs) measure marketing performance in each stage of the marketing funnel. The KPIs for each category and funnel stage are different, which means various measurements are more or less important at any given time in the campaign. 

For example, in a digital performance campaign, the number of times your brand is displayed to an audience, or its impressions, is an especially important metric during the Awareness stage. But, during the Consideration stage, the click-thru rate (CTR) and cost per click (CPC) become more critical. 

As the campaign goes on, the customer acquisition cost (CAC) is a measurement that helps determine the overall effectiveness of a campaign. But, just one CAC from one distribution channel doesn’t tell the whole story. Instead, it’s necessary to look at the combined CAC from each channel to begin getting a better picture of the campaign’s effectiveness. 

Another common metric is return on ad spend (ROAS), which evaluates the incremental revenue generated for each dollar spent on ads. ROAS matters, but it shows short-term gains and that can hamper long-term goals and sustainable growth. 

But looking at any single performance metric in isolation limits your view of the campaign. 

Considering a variety of metrics in branding, performance and retention campaigns that focus on all three stages of the marketing funnel offers a view that leads to full funnel effectiveness.

In order to achieve full funnel effectiveness, marketers need to consider three layers of measurement:

Layer 1: Channel metrics that measure speed, reach and awareness

• CPM - cost per mille, or the cost of 1,000 impressions

• CPC - cost per click, or the cost of each click on an ad or link on a particular channel

• CTR - click thru rate, the number of clicks on a specific link

Layer 2: Engagement and conversion metrics 

• Time on site - the longer a consumer stays on a site, the more interest they are likely to have

• Bounce rate - when a visitor leaves in less than 10 seconds

• CVR - conversion rates measure actions taken by the audience. Signing up for a newsletter or making a purchase are two examples

Layer 3: Business impact metrics

• Incremental lift - the increase in KPIs that wouldn’t have happened without marketing activities

• CLV - customer lifetime value, or the total profit generated by a customer throughout their relationship with a business

• CAC - customer acquisition cost or the resources and costs necessary to acquire a new customer’

• Contribution margin - the amount of revenue from one sale compared to the amount you paid to make that sale. Contribution margin differs from profit margin because it excludes the fixed costs of doing business 

As you can see, measuring the true effectiveness of a marketing campaign requires tracking and considering multiple metrics at every stage of the marketing funnel. 

“One thing is for certain: by measuring and optimizing campaigns with attention metrics, advertisers can go beyond viewability and drive better performance and outcomes while eliminating low-attention domains and ad units.” - Report: What Do 9,000 Brand Lift Studies Teach Us About Attention & Memory? 

Brand lift measurement shows how consumers’ perceptions and behaviors change as a result of your marketing and advertising campaign. A brand lift study uses organic search traffic and feedback directly from customers through surveys in order to uncover metrics that would be difficult to perceive in other ways. 

Another useful tool is the A/B hold out test. A hold out group is similar to a control group in a scientific experiment. They are a segment of the audience that is purposefully excluded from updates and changes to the brand. This allows brands to compare things like engagement, retention and revenue between the hold out group and the wider audience to watch for negative side effects of changes such as user fatigue. 

While A/B testing is useful, when it comes to brand lift and other brand campaign measurements, what you ultimately want to ensure is:

1. That your message is clear and 

2. That your audience can recall your brand 

After all, the entire point of this type of campaign is to make sure your brand and brand messaging is resonating with your target audience. By conducting market research in combination with these metrics before you launch, you get a deeper understanding of not only whether your brand awareness campaign will do well, but why consumers like (or don’t like) it, how it made them feel as well as where you can improve so you get the best version out there when it’s time to launch.

Using third-party tools is almost always necessary in this case. Here are few consumer insights to that can help you better understand what resonate with your audience: 

• Zappi

• Suzy

• GWI

• Qualtrics

• Statsig

Eyeglass brand Warby Parker’s campaign “Glasses for All” is a great example of a campaign that took all these factors into account and showcases true digital storytelling, 

Although “eye glasses” and “emotional connection” may not seem related, when consumers make an emotional connection with a brand, they spend more. Eyeglass brand Warby Parker’s campaign Glasses for All involves great digital story telling and makes an emotional impact among viewers. 

The campaign promotes the Buy a Pair, Give a Pair program. In this program, Warby Parker partners with nonprofit and government organizations around the globe to make sure that for every pair of glasses the brand sells, a pair is given to someone who needs them. They prioritize communities where there’s a high need for vision care and low access to eyeglasses. 

The campaign clearly communicates their brand message and had an emotional impact on viewers.

With all of the different metrics, layers and tools it’s not at all surprising to learn that mistakes happen. Some of the most common pitfalls include things like misattribution, over-reliance on metrics from the platform being used or ignoring offline outcomes. 

In multi-touch campaigns, a brand may have paid ads, a social media influencer partnership and an email touch. Knowing which channel brought customers to your site or caused them to take action helps you better understand how to allocate your marketing budget in the future. Because misattribution can become a costly mistake. 

Platforms like Meta and Google provide helpful metrics, but they’re not objective bystanders. They have interests of their own and those interests don’t necessarily align with your brand’s. As with virtually all metrics, they are best viewed in combination with those from other sources. 

For CPG and QSR brands in particular, offline outcomes can be significant. Consumers may walk into a brick and mortar location and make purchases rather than ordering online. Understanding how your campaign may have motivated those purchases helps you get a clearer picture of your marketing effectiveness. 

Just as looking at metrics in isolation can lead to a skewed understanding of campaign effectiveness, but so can looking at measurements that aren’t aligned with the goals of the campaign. For example, a marketing team designing a campaign to increase conversions will need to track different metrics than a team working to increase brand awareness. 

As we briefly noted before, starting a campaign with a clear intent is only the first step. The next is deciding what success would look like for the campaign and setting KPIs. After that you’ll need benchmarks based on competitive intelligence and historical performance. 

Once you understand where you are and where you want to be, you need an interactive tool or framework for mapping your goals to your metrics. This way, you can see your progress toward your goals in the data, much like watching your progress on a map when you use navigation on your phone. 

Describing tools and discussing metrics only goes so far. Here’s a look at some good examples of brands that are using metrics effectively: 

Shake Shack

Shake Shack introduces numerous new products, but until recently, had very little concrete information about consumers’ reasons for liking or not liking them. Each new roll out was essentially a gamble, sometimes of millions of dollars. 

Recently, the brand began analyzing customer feedback for each limited time offer which allowed them to more fully understand the reception of new products, as well as changes the chain could make to the customer experience in general.

Netflix

Netflix is a master of marketing, and part of the reason is that they pay close attention to their customers. For example, Netflix didn’t originate the phrase “Netflix and chill” but when people started using it they were aware and embraced it. Now, it's understood and part of the culture. 

One of the reasons that Netflix is successful is because they collect a massive amount of data and put it to good use, so that their customers benefit. Feedback loops are built into the service, and then they apply what they learn to their marketing strategy. 

SoFi

All the metrics we’ve discussed so far are crucial to the marketing department, but teams throughout an organization need access to results concerning new products, changes to the customer experience, limited time offers and other promotions. Clear, easy to understand visual dashboards can make communicating across the organization simpler. 

The brand SoFi partnered with Zappi to provide quantitative evaluation and qualitative diagnosis along with other analytics so that departments throughout the company could have access to information about campaigns. So in addition to creating more effective campaigns, more departments have visibility into what’s working and what’s not. 

The result? SoFi increased their ad effectiveness by 20% thanks to working with Zappi. 

For a deeper look into this work, get the full story here. 

The tools for smarter measuring of campaign effectiveness are evolving quickly, which is a bit of a double-edged sword for marketers. 

On one hand, you have more information across multiple domains so that you get a full picture of how the campaign is going, giving you the ability to test and iterate. On the other hand, it’s easy to get stuck on what tools to use (and over-engineering your tech stack can become a real danger). 

Some of the most useful tools include: 

• Google Analytics 4, or GA4 - Google’s analytics tools are well-known and many tutorials and use cases are available. 

• HubSpot - Similarly, HubSpot is a trusted vendor offering tools for marketing automation, social media, and analytics, with a vast array of resources. 

• Zappi - This is an agile connected consumer insights platform that allows you to learn what’s working with your consumer and what’s not, as well as what you can do to iterate smarter with AI Agents. 

• Tableau - Focusing on data analysis and community, Tableau offers a range of tools to help brands explore their data and better understand their audiences.

Currently, most of the tools available are for measuring the effectiveness of current campaigns, but that’s changing. AI is just beginning to shift from measuring to forecasting. Along with being able to accurately predict what consumers need and want, brands will be able to unify multi-channel marketing plans and quickly see how different metrics contribute to the overall success of the campaign. 

One of the most common worries about using AI to measure is balancing compliance and privacy. Laws such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) aimed at protecting consumers’ privacy require brands to have permission to collect certain types of data. 

At the same time, the end of cookies has been coming for quite some time, and though Google recently announced they will continue to support cookies for the time being, it’s not clear that they will be reliable. Using reputable tools to measure marketing effectiveness while also maintaining compliance requires a thoughtful approach. 

“Emerging agentic AI technologies—such as OpenAI’s Operator or Mastercard’s Agent Pay—are on the brink of revolutionizing purchasing behavior,” writes Dave Mayer in Ad Age. Mayer isn’t alone in thinking that big changes are coming for both brands and consumers. 

As the tools for measuring how consumers respond to brands change, so does the way that consumers journey from awareness to purchase. Search and AI each play a distinct role in the process. Writing in Adweek, Jessica Shapiro notes, “Data is the connective tissue. It’s what helps marketers see the full picture—not just where people are showing up, but how their behavior is evolving across platforms.” 

By taking advantage of tools that allow you to track what’s working and what’s not, you can see that evolution in real time, and more importantly, respond to it.