Businesses need to know what metrics to track for campaigns to accurately gauge their marketing efforts' effectiveness and performance. Measuring metrics informs your marketing team specifically about how to optimize and improve your campaigns. Depending on your goals and marketing channels, you must choose which metrics will best help determine whether you're succeeding.
If you're wondering what to measure when tracking marketing metrics, ratings and impressions are two critical metrics to consider for many campaigns. Here we'll go over these metrics and when it's best to track each one.
What Are Ratings?
Ratings are most often used in radio ads and TV commercials due to the simplicity of measuring their reach. Traditionally, ratings were the standard for tracking performance because they inform advertisers of the percentage of the population reached by the campaign. Percentage figures are great for easily explaining what coverage the ads delivered.
What Are Impressions?
Impressions provide the actual number of viewers of a campaign. Measuring ad impressions is essential for tracking campaigns across a wide range of mediums – not just linear TV. Using this metric will help track email opens, Facebook ads displays, banner ad displays, and the number of website page views, to name a few. When generating results using this methodology, you will be able to see the total number of impressions delivered across all platforms for your campaign. There is an increase in the number of advertising agencies buying off of impressions for this reason.
Tracking Both Ratings and Impressions
Ultimately, it's best to track both metrics simultaneously for all of your ad campaigns. Ratings and impressions give you different information about your ads and their performance. Both are equally valuable metrics that enable you to supply information on how many or what percentage saw a campaign.
Both of these metrics offer insight for measuring brand awareness. If you want to determine how many people are exposed to your brand through ads, ratings and impressions can give you valuable insights. This can then help you with brand exposure data. Based on the kinds of conversion rates and sales, you will see what continual tweaking is needed for future campaigns.
Combining your efforts into tracking both helps you develop a complete picture of your advertising performance. While both individually provide information, any single metric will have some blind spots. Just like when merging, you don’t want to rely on just one mirror to see if you’re clear. Having insight from both ratings and impressions will tell you more specifically how your ads perform, showing you the best course for future campaigns.
Work with a Media Partner to Decide Which Metrics Matter in Your Campaign
If you're not sure which marketing metrics to measure, a media partner can help. A dependable media partner can help marketing teams understand and interpret metrics to optimize better campaigns going forward. By effectively tracking insights that matter most, you'll determine how to develop more compelling campaigns that truly drive success.
