So You Started Advertising. Now What?
Congratulations! You’ve taken the bold step of creating a business, building a brand, and establishing an online presence. That takes a lot of dedication and is no small feat! Now comes the next step; scaling through advertising.
How to Measure What Matters and Optimize for Real Results
Congratulations! You’ve taken the bold step of creating a business, building a brand, and establishing an online presence. That takes a lot of dedication and is no small feat! Now comes the next step; scaling through advertising.
Most ad campaigns don’t fail because the product is bad, but because businesses focus on the wrong metrics. Impressions and clicks are only the start. What really matters is what happens after the click that determines whether you’re profitable or just paying for noise.
Don’t Chase Vanity Metrics
The first questions you should be asking when determining what metrics matter are; are my website visitors engaging? And, are they converting? Too often, businesses get stuck tracking surface-level stats. While these can help gauge early resonance, they don’t tell you if your advertising is actually driving business results.
Impressions, clicks, click-thru-rate (CTR), and “likes” are misleading and do not truly measure what matters. They are a great start and should be watched in the very beginning of an advertising campaign, but ultimately do not indicate sales or conversions.
Impressions are how many times an ad is shown. It could be shown 20 times to the same person. Impressions do not measure unique views. Impressions are a direct representation of how much budget you are spending on ads and can increase or decrease in accordance with spend, audience, and media tactic. The only thing impressions tell you is that your ad is being delivered.
Clicks and likes are engagement metrics because they are based on different actions consumers can take on your ad. Clicks and likes should be used to understand if your advertising message resonates with your audience. However, they do not measure if the same customer is engaging on your website and also does not necessarily mean the same person who clicked on your ad to review your website is going to convert.
CTR is a formula used to measure what percentage of consumers click on the ad and are directed to your website based on the number of impressions. The formula is the number of clicks divided by the number of impressions, then multiplied by 100 to get the percentage.
So what are the metrics that matter?
Customer acquisition cost (CAC) and return on ad spend (ROAS).
Customer acquisition cost measures the total amount of money your business needs to spend to gain a new customer and is crucial for profitability. Return on ad spend measures total gross revenue compared to advertising costs and indicates campaign effectiveness. You will need to review both regularly to ensure performance.
If you are not reaching your CAC or ROAS goals, the following steps need to be reviewed to optimize your campaigns for effectiveness.
Follow the Customer Journey
Ads bring attention—your website must convert. Review the key funnel stages: ad engagement, landing page experience, conversion (form fill or purchase).
The first step is to review the ads and monitor engagement. Test different creative, copy, and audiences. Identify which combinations deliver not just clicks, but quality traffic to the site.
The next step is to review the landing page experience on your website. Slow load times kill conversions. Make sure your website is consistent with your ad messaging and includes other ways for customers to engage, like blog posts to solve frequent customer problems or signing up for a newsletter.
Finally, watch for drop-off points in the form fill or purchase experience. Streamline the journey into as few clicks as possible. Reduce friction at the point of entry by requesting the minimally viable amount of customer information necessary. Align every step with customer intent.
Even small adjustments in these steps can dramatically impact CAC and ROAS.
Use Heatmapping Videos as Your Secret Shopper
Want to know where customers get stuck? Tools like Microsoft Clarity, Hotjar, and Crazy Egg show you how real people interact with your site. They record videos and show heatmaps based on engagement on your website to easily spot friction points like slow load times, confusing navigation, and consumer drop-off points. Reviewing these tools regularly can help you catch traffic patterns and monitor customer journey issues, enabling you to spot and fix problems before they drain your ad budget.
Microsoft Clarity Heatmap Example - Watch Video
Ongoing Optimization
Advertising isn’t “set it and forget it.” It’s an ongoing process of learning, testing, and refining to be effective and profitable. Now that you know what metrics to look for, you can be confident in your advertising campaigns and grow your business exponentially.
Install analytics and tracking tools before you spend ad money. Review key metrics of CTR, CAC and ROAS weekly at a minimum. Watch heatmapping sessions regularly to identify bottlenecks. Then, adjust your ads and your web pages based on data, not guesswork.
Schedule a meeting with me to learn more about how advertising can support your goals!
