How Much Should You Really Value These Advertising Metrics?

If you have ever purchased digital advertising, you have probably been promised a gaudy number of impressions. There are even companies out there that say things like, “We guarantee a million impressions,” and a million impressions likely sounds like a million opportunities to win new customers.

An impression could mean someone watching your ad in its entirety, remembering it, and then making a purchase because of it. It may also mean your ad loaded near the bottom of someone’s screen while they looked for a recipe that they didn't end up using because most people don't have saffron just lying around.

Impressions are among the easiest advertising metrics to increase. Spend more money, broaden the audience, or run the campaign longer, and the number goes up. That does not necessarily mean the campaign generated interest, changed anyone’s mind, or produced a single customer.

Every metric has a purpose, but they are not equally valuable. Which ones you care about the most will largely depend on what the goals of your campaign are, but all else being equal, some are just better than others. While metrics like impressions still matter to some extent, you shouldn’t overvalue empty-calorie stats that look excellent on paper but don’t actually get you closer to your goals. Here is how much excitement each one actually deserves.

Impressions: Empty Calories

Impressions measure how many times an advertisement was displayed.

They do not tell you whether anyone noticed it, read it, remembered it, or even had it visible on their screen for more than a moment.

Impressions are useful for measuring campaign scale, but they are not evidence of effectiveness. A large number mostly proves that the advertising platform successfully served the advertisement.

That is technically something. But impressions are basically a direct function of how much you’re spending. That doesn’t come with a lot of insight.

Reach: The Participation Trophy

Reach measures how many unique people were served your advertisement.

That makes it more useful than impressions because it separates actual audience size from repeat exposure. It is particularly helpful when evaluating awareness campaigns or determining whether a campaign reached enough of its intended market.

Still, reach measures opportunity rather than impact. Someone being served an advertisement does not mean they noticed or remembered it.

You were introduced. Whether they remember meeting you is another question.

Frequency: Are We Annoying Them Yet?

Frequency tells you how many times, on average, each person saw your advertisement. There is real value in this metric because people are much more likely to remember an ad and engage with it once they’ve seen it more than once. Keeping a watchful eye on frequency also keeps you from showing the same ad to the same people too many times, which comes with its own risks.

Too little frequency may mean your audience never saw the message enough to remember it. Too much can produce ad fatigue, causing people to ignore the campaign or resent the brand interrupting them for the 37th time. There’s always that one commercial that Hulu feels the need to show you during every single commercial break that makes you want to cancel your subscription. It’s important to back off before it gets to that point.

Frequency is valuable for diagnosing delivery problems and managing exposure. It is not a success metric by itself.

Think of it as the dashboard warning light of digital advertising.

Engagement Rate: You’ve Gotten Their Attention

Engagement rate measures likes, comments, reactions, shares, and other platform-specific interactions, particularly on social channels.

With engagement rate, we’ve reached kind of the mid-tier of metrics because engagements are an actual indication of the audience doing something because of what you’re showing them. They liked your piece of media enough to like it or share it in a group chat where everyone undoubtedly gave it the “ha ha” icon on the text bubble.

High engagement can indicate that the creative resonated with its audience. It can also indicate that people thought the advertisement was funny, strange, controversial, or worthy of tagging a friend beneath it.

None of those actions necessarily means someone intends to buy anything, but this metric really applies more to organic media anyway. With paid media, you’re usually trying to direct the viewer to something like a landing page, and that is measured with other metrics that are yet to make an appearance on this list.

Engagement is useful evidence that people cared enough to react. Just remember that applause and revenue are not the same thing.

View-Through Rate: You’ve Kept Their Attention

View-through rate measures how many viewers watched a video to a specified point or through completion.

This is often more valuable information than something like engagement rate because it gives you more insight into how you can improve the ad itself. A strong VTR suggests that the video held attention, which is valuable when evaluating creative performance. If most viewers leave within three seconds, the opening probably needs work. 

But finishing a video does not guarantee that someone understood the message, remembered the advertiser, or felt persuaded.

They watched it. That is better than not watching it.

Cost Per Engagement: Important for Your Bottom Line, but Doesn’t Tell You Everything

Cost per engagement measures how much each like, comment, share, or other interaction cost.

It is useful when comparing creative, audiences, and platforms. The problem is that inexpensive engagement is not automatically valuable engagement.

This metric, like all cost per ___ metrics, is important because we all know advertising isn’t free and you want to make sure you’re reaching the most people for what is ideally as low of a cost as possible. Looking at cost per engagement along with total engagement, or cost per impression along with total impressions, gives you a pretty clear picture of your ad spend. But cost per ___ metrics don’t tell you on their own whether the spending is worth it. You still need to weigh the costs against the results.

Paying pennies for thousands of irrelevant reactions is not necessarily better than paying more to reach a smaller group of qualified prospects. Cheap attention is still expensive when it accomplishes nothing.

Click-Through Rate: Tells You How Many People Started the Journey, but Not How Many People Finished It

Click-through rate (CTR) measures the percentage of viewers who clicked after seeing an advertisement.

This is a more meaningful signal because someone made an active choice to learn more. The advertising successfully moved them from passive exposure to action.

However, a click is only the beginning. If visitors immediately leave the landing page, never contact the company, or discover that the offer was not what they expected, a high CTR may simply indicate that the advertisement was better than the destination. 

There are still opportunities to lose your audience even after they click. Getting people to click on your ad is an important step, but it doesn’t quite get the campaign across the finish line.

Conversion Rate: The Holy Grail

Conversions measure whether people completed the action the campaign was designed to generate, so conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who complete the desired action after reaching the website or landing page.

Of anything on this list, it’s the clearest indicator of whether you’re accomplishing your goals. It is one of the most useful performance metrics because it reveals whether targeting, creative, messaging, the offer, and the landing-page experience are working together. 

Not only is it the best measure of success, but it also gives you the most information for how to improve the campaign itself if it currently isn’t successful. Maybe the advertisement attracts the wrong people. Maybe the landing page is confusing. Maybe the offer is not compelling. Maybe the form asks for someone’s complete medical history before allowing them to download a brochure. Looking at discrepancies between your conversion rate and CTR shows you where you’re losing people, which then means you can adjust to keep that from happening.

Conversion rate does not explain every problem, but it tells you when something is not working.

Stop Throwing Parties for Large Numbers

Every advertising metric provides information. Impressions, reach, frequency, engagement, and video views help diagnose campaign delivery and creative performance. The mistake is treating those numbers as business outcomes.

A campaign with modest reach and strong conversions may be far more valuable than one with millions of impressions and no meaningful action. The goal is not always to generate the largest number. It is to generate the right result.

At the end of the campaign, the most important question is not, “How many people could have seen this?” As people who put great effort into ads, it always makes us happy to know numerous people see it. But the most important thing is defining a goal at the beginning of a campaign and getting tangible results that work towards that goal.

My, what fun we’ve had talking about what is essentially math. If you are keen to learn more about what metrics you should value, or if you want to turn more of those impressions into conversions, then use the form below to schedule a meeting at the labs. In the irony of ironies, you’d be helping the form’s conversion rate.