You’re not alone if you’ve ever struggled to pinpoint which marketing performance channels are actually driving growth. According to Gartner’s research, digital marketing leaders are struggling with data overload and can’t define marketing campaign success metrics. Most traditional measures lack nuances and can’t capture needle-moving efforts.
This lack of granularity leaves marketers in the dark, relying on vanity figures like CTR or impressions that look good on paper but fail to translate into actionable insights. The result? Budget misallocations, underperforming campaigns, and missed opportunities for optimization. This blog introduces the best marketing channel performance metrics for successful measurement.
Key highlights:
- Traditional marketing metrics like CTR and impressions often look good on paper but fail to show real impact, leading to poor decisions and wasted budgets.
- Advanced metrics like iROAS and incremental conversion rate provide a clear picture of your marketing’s incremental impact and true ROI.
- Holistic marketing channel performance tracking with metrics like spillover rate shows how different channels work together, helping you create more coordinated campaigns.
- Tools like Keen simplify tracking channel performance metrics, decreasing marketers’ manual work.
Why marketers need advanced channel metrics
Marketing has come a long way—moving from single-channel campaigns to complex ecosystems where customers engage across social media, paid search, email, and more. This shift has created new challenges in measuring performance because traditional metrics suffer from:
- Being broad and vague: Traditional marketing KPIs give an overview but lack the granularity needed to assess individual channels. For example, ROI might tell you how much money you’re making overall, but it doesn’t reveal which channels are actually contributing to that growth or which ones are draining resources.
- Focusing on vanity: High click-through rates or large reach numbers don’t always correlate with meaningful business outcomes. According to a study by Viant, 36% of CFOs expressed concern over CMOs’ focus on vanity metrics. While the study is from 2018, it captures the sentiments of CFOs that are still valid today.
- Operating in data silos: Traditional metrics often ignore the interplay between channels, leading to incomplete insights. For example, CAC aggregates customer acquisition costs but often ignores incremental impact—how much of that acquisition can be directly tied to your efforts.
The solution: Advanced, channel-specific metrics that focus on marketing incrementality, efficiency, and causal impact. These metrics uncover the true value of each channel and guide you in optimizing your marketing strategy.
8 marketing performance metrics to better measure channel success
So how to measure channel performance? Let’s review the best metrics for marketing teams.
| Types of marketing metrics | Channel performance metrics examples | Impact |
| Incremental metrics | iROASIncremental conversion rateTrue incremental lift | Isolating the true impact of marketing efforts, avoiding reliance on inflated or vanity numbers. |
| Efficiency metrics | Marginal CPCeCPA | Highlighting how efficiently ad spend drives results, ensuring you allocate budgets to maximize return and minimize waste. |
| Engagement metrics | TERRPSD | Revealing what content truly resonates with audiences, allowing for refined strategies. |
| Impact metrics | Spillover rate | Showing the indirect, amplified effects of marketing efforts, providing insights into broader campaign influence and efficiency. |
1. Incremental ROAS (iROAS)
iROAS measures the return on ad spend based solely on revenue generated from incremental conversions. Unlike traditional ROAS, which includes all conversions (even those that might have happened without your campaign), iROAS focuses on what your marketing efforts truly added.
Despite its importance, only 25% of marketers measure incrementality, according to a BCG research report. The low percentage implies that the majority of marketers are relying on inflated ROAS figures, making it harder to identify true marketing impact.
- Why it matters: iROAS is a channel management performance metric, which helps you identify which campaigns are genuinely driving growth and which are just inflating numbers.
- How to measure: Use geo-experiments or holdout groups to isolate incremental revenue. For instance, run campaigns in selected regions and compare their results to regions without campaign exposure. This helps isolate the impact of your advertising efforts.
- Practical use: If a campaign’s iROAS is low, it’s a sign to reevaluate ad spend or creative strategies.
Read more: iROAS vs ROAS: What’s the difference?
2. Incremental conversion rate
Incremental conversions track the new conversions directly attributable to your campaign—beyond the baseline.
- Why it matters: Incremental conversion rate highlights whether your efforts are genuinely driving new actions rather than cannibalizing organic conversions.
- How to measure: Establish a baseline conversion rate for non-exposed groups, then measure how much higher it is for exposed groups.
- Practical use: Identify which campaigns are effective in driving conversion growth, particularly in paid media.
Keep learning: How incremental is my media performance?
3. True incremental lift
The incremental lift quantifies the increase in revenue, leads, or conversions driven by your campaign compared to a control group.
- Why it matters: This metric gives a clear understanding of a campaign’s impact.
- How to measure: Implement A/B testing or split testing, where one group sees the campaign and the other doesn’t.
- Practical use: Use this metric to validate investments in new channels or experimental campaigns.
4. Marginal cost per conversion (CPC)
Marginal CPC analyzes the cost of acquiring the next customer at your current spending level.
- Why it matters: Marginal CPC helps you avoid overspending on channels with diminishing returns.
- How to measure: Increase ad spend in small, controlled increments and track the additional cost required to generate each new conversion.
- Practical use: Optimize marketing channel mix and budget allocation by identifying the point of diminishing returns for each channel.
5. Effective cost per acquisition (eCPA)
eCPA adjusts the traditional CPA metric to include only incremental conversions.
- Why it matters: eCPA ensures you’re only factoring in meaningful, incremental results.
- How to measure: Divide total spend by the number of incremental conversions driven by a campaign.
- Practical use: Prioritize high eCPA campaigns for optimization or budget cuts.
6. True engagement rate (TER)
TER analyzes meaningful interactions, such as comments, shares, and saves, relative to total impressions. This metric goes beyond vanity metrics to show the actual resonance of your content.
- Why it matters: TER identifies what content genuinely engages your audience beyond passive views.
- How to measure: Divide meaningful interactions by total impressions to derive the engagement rate.
- Practical use: Refine content strategies by focusing on formats or topics with high engagement rates.
7. Revenue per session depth (RPSD)
RPSD evaluates the revenue generated per session based on user engagement depth. This metric is useful when you’re optimizing your website for retention.
- Why it matters: RPSD balances traffic volume with monetization, highlighting the quality of user sessions rather than just quantity.
- How to measure: Calculate revenue generated per user session and segment by engagement depth (for example, pages viewed and time spent).
- Practical use: Optimize site design or user flow to encourage deeper engagements and drive higher revenues.
8. Cross-channel spillover rate
Also called the halo effect, the spillover rate measures how a campaign on one channel influences activity on another. For example, social media ads may drive users to search for your brand organically.
- Why it matters: The halo effect provides insights into how channels work together, enabling better campaign coordination.
- How to measure: Track correlated spikes in organic search traffic or other indirect engagement metrics during campaign runs by understanding the causality in marketing.
- Practical use: Design campaigns that leverage spillover effects, such as integrating social media ads with email marketing.
Simplify tracking key metrics for marketing with Keen
Manual measurement of campaign performance metrics like spillover rates and incremental lift might waste hours of your team on spreadsheets and multiple tools. This is where Keen’s AI-powered MMM platform makes it simple.
By letting you define your decision frame, our platform:
- Aligns with your marketing and business goals
- Ensures accountability with features like holdout tests and decompositions
- Adapts to real-world changes through continuous learning
Beyond intelligence, you get speed and accessibility with simplified data requirements for your marketing measurement. Separate data provisioning from decision-making and streamline processes to act confidently in dynamic environments. Take a free trial of Keen and start evaluating your marketing efforts with these advanced marketing channel performance metrics today.
