Online advertising can help entities like businesses, musicians, politicians, and event organizers to achieve their numerous objectives such as to inform, persuade, remind and reinforce. However, there are various online advertising key performance indicators to measure all these – different entities pay attention to different online advertising key performance indicators.  In addition, different online advertising methods will give you different key performance indicators, e.g. SEO vs. Social media marketing.

There are many online advertising key performance indicators, no one is the best for all entities – it depends on what the objectives of the online advertising are in the first place.  Some online advertising agencies in Nigeria and digital marketing platforms base their online advertising rates on one or two of the key performance indicators.  

The 5 listed online advertising key performance indicators below are common ones that are applicable in virtually all online advertising methods.

1. Click

Click is one of online advertising key performance indicators; it shows how many internet users that follow the online advertising link to a particular page instantly to a landing page by clicking on it. In online advertising, users can click banners, photos, hyper text links, etc.  There are clicks by hum beings and clicks by robots. The more there are clicks the more “traffics” a landing page will get, which leads us to No.2 online advertising key performance indicator.

2. Traffic

Traffic is one of the great online advertising key performance indicators; traffics to sites, articles, fanpages, videos, and other contents show that users are actually visiting and seeing them.  Just like clicks, there are traffics by human and robots.  Traffics whether paid or free, the more traffics a page/content gets the more “impressions” it will get, which leads us to the No.3 online advertising key performance indicator.

3. Impressions

You cannot talk about online advertising key performance indicators without mentioning impressions. Impressions are number of users that see advert, page, video, article, or anything that you want the target audience to see. Of course, there are robots and human generated impressions in a given landing page. In addition, there are served impressions and viewability impressions (how many people actually viewed the content, not just recorded served impressions).   The more valuable impressions are, the better the “reach”, which is the no. 4 online advertising key performance indicator.

4. Reach

Reach is one of the top best key performance indicators; this is the bedrock of online advertising, because without reach, the other previous online advertising key performance indicators will be almost useless. Reach makes it possible to really be addressing and talking to the people the messages, products, services or the issues are meant for. Most of the online advertising benefits are centered on reach.  Reaching the right audience will lead to them taking “action”, which brings us to no.5 online advertising key performance indicator.

5. Action

Action is one of the main online advertising reasons or key performance indicators. Action leads to achieving the goals of an entity, without action, investment in the other key performance indicators might be wasted, or almost useless. Different entities expect divergent actions from their online advertising campaigns. For example, action for a political online advertising is users voting, action for insurance company can be users filling a form, action for public enlightenment by government can be masses maintaining a law or policy, while products’ sellers can be making sales, etc.

There is no an all conquering approach for online advertising key performances for all entities.  It all depends on the entity and what it wants to achieve. Therefore, it is important to focus on what matters to you as an advertiser not because it is available. Examples, an entity that its mean objective running adverts is to create awareness may care about impressions only; news site may care about traffics, etc.

In some cases you may need multiple online advertising key performance indicators to evaluate your online advertising investment. It is also important to base your online advertising key performance indicator on what is obtainable not just what you want. For example, a newly introduced technical product may not get sales immediately; it is likely to get other key performance indicators (impressions, clicks and traffics), because awareness has to be created, etc. Therefore, focus on the right online advertising key performance indicators.