You're a business owner or a marketing agency and you're about to turn on your paid media campaign. Do you have everything in place to ensure your campaign will be successful? The first thing you need to think about is your KPIs, your ad key performance indicators.
Your KPI should be the closest thing that you can possibly get to a sale -- that should be the thing that you're measuring. The KPI is your shining star, your guiding light. It's the foundational element, the thing that your paid-media team knows it's optimizing towards. It's very important to have this idea solidified in your mind and in the mind of your paid-media team.
For example, if you're doing ecommerce and you can track sales, your KPI should probably be based on sales, return on ad spend (ROAS), and customer acquisition cost (CAC). Simply knowing what your KPI is, is a big, very important foundational step to take before you launch your paid-media campaign.
The next component is volume. How many of the acts do you need? How many sales? How many leads? How many video views? How many clicks? How many site visits? How much view time do you need to see a meaningful impact on your sales? This is the next metric that you want to be looking at. As a business, you can make a determination: 'I need a million sales per month,' 'I need 100,000 sales a month,' etc. Volume is a component to understanding where you should buy advertising and how much you should be spending on advertising.
The final component is your baseline metrics. Even if you've never spent a penny on paid media in the past, you should have an idea of what your cost per sale should be, your CACs, or your cost per lead. Imagine you're a business that determined your cost per lead is $20; that's the number that you think makes sense for the economics of your business. Now, you may run paid media and find that the cost per lead is actually $50, but at least your paid-media team knows that $50 is not good. A lot of this is about giving your paid-media team the knowledge, insight, and foundational components to ensure that they know how to be successful with your investment.
