STRATEGY AND PLANNING GUIDE: KPIs GLOSSARY

Introduction to Strategy & Planning: Key Performance Indicator (KPI) Glossary

This is a summary of some of the KPIs you should be familiar with as a supplement to S1E2 of our strategy and planning guide.

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Consideration and Conversion KPIs

Traffic - triggered by a request to (a proxy for people) open a website destination. There are various ways to measure this from ‘sessions’ that record browser instances, to ‘unique visitors’ that require cookies etc.
Dwell time - how long a browser is left open on a page, not an exact science but used as a proxy for whether people are engaging with content. If you have an article like this one, you might want to see if people take the time to read it.
Bounce Rate - browsers (people proxy) who arrive at a page, and then quickly leave. This is often seen as one to improve by reducing its value; by encouraging people to explore other pages on your website, or investing time in the content.
Downloads - has something been downloaded
Transactions - has a defined transaction happened - for example did someone click a ‘buy now’, or did a but now successfully complete purchase etc
Registrations - successful data collection
CPC; Cost per Click - the cost of a campaign divided by the number of conversions. This can end up being a basic form of ROI if a business is paying attention to its ‘break-even numbers’. For example, there may well be a response rate of only 100 people from 1,000 emails, but if they are high-value responses then this could be a great result.

Awareness KPIs

Visibility/Viewability - how viewable an ad is (eg is it likely to have been seen on a webpage).
Impressions - Number of times an ad is served
CPC; Cost Per Click - total media spend divided by the number of clicks, this is another consideration metric, but can be a proxy for how well an individual execution or media placement is working compared to others that have a CTA (Call To Action).
CTR; Click Through Rate - is another consideration metric, not an awareness one. Where possible steer clients away from this as a measure of success in awareness campaigns unless there is a clear CTA and customer journey.
CPM; Cost per Mille - the price of media based on buying one thousand 1,000 placements (mille in French, not Million in English!)
ROAS; Return on Advertising Spend - just looked at through the lens of the cost of the media buy rather than the cost of the campaign (including for example creative production)
ROI; Return on Investment - generally includes the creative and production costs of the campaign, to reflect a ‘real world return’ on dollars spent by a business
SOV; Share of Voice - can be a useful measure, for example, by tracking share of search around particular keywords

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