Media Mandible

So you know what the client wants, and you know what they’ve done before. Now it’s time to establish KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). In other words, you have to determine on what basis the success or failure of the campaign is going to be determined.

The trick here is that the goals the client gives you probably don’t translate directly into realistic KPIs. They might say, to use the most common example, that they want to “increase awareness of the brand.” This sounds good in theory, but it’s hard to measure. Or rather, the way in which it is best measured is up for argument. It’s necessary to have that discussion up front, before the campaign is even planned.

Some common KPIs: click-through rate, ROI, conversion rate, and increase in web traffic.

I’ve seen some agencies talk about “impressions delivered” as if this is a KPI. But really, the number of impressions delivered, once the campaign has been planned, is a measure of basic competency, mostly on the part of the publisher.

If “awareness” is really what you’re going for, then run an awareness study before and after the campaign…if you’re thinking online online only, then it’s common to use Dynamic Logic or someone similar. But that costs money and takes time, and the client may not go for that…which is fine. That gives you the opportunity to say, “Okay, so it looks like we can’t actually measure awareness. So let’s talk about what we are going to measure.”

Clients sometimes squirm during this type of discussion, because they often have no idea what to say. This is a great opportunity for you, the media planner to introduce your own ideas about what the KPIs ought to be. In this way, you are outlining the metrics of your own success.

KPIs should be simple. Draw a distinction in your own mind between what you could use as KPIs and what you should use as KPIs. If you know ad ops and analytics very well, you probably have all kinds of metrics that you could bring into consideration. And maybe you should…later on, as icing on the cake. But for now, keep it simple.

It’s worth noting that the person who drives the up-front discussion of KPIs usually has to be the media planner. That’s because it’s a discussion that takes place around the same time that the deal with the client is being cinched, and during that time, nobody else involved, at either company, is really interested in thinking about or discussing the end of the campaign, or even, in many cases, the details of what the campaign is going to be like. But for your own good (and, it’s worth noting, the good of the client), you have got to make that conversation happen.

Also, don’t fall into the trap of letting the client misuse the KPI conversation to set you up for failure. “Okay, the KPI is clicks, and we expect a 30% CTR,” is not an acceptable conclusion.