What are KPIs for programmatic advertising?

As advertisers, the best way to maximize the return on investments, profit and optimize brands’ ad spending is to track and analyze the efficiency of advertising. And the best way to attain correct evaluation of ad campaigns is to set KPIs based on the goals an advertiser is seeking to achieve and on the stage of the sales funnel. Thus, for the upper-funnel and down-funnel ad campaigns KPIs will be completely different. Let’s learn more. 

Upper-funnel ad campaign KPI

The goal of this stage of ad campaigns is to drive brand awareness and users interest in a brand’s products or services. So it’s important to attract the attention of as many users as possible. 

Pay attention on these KPIs:

• Reach — the number of unique users who saw the ad
• Frequency — is how often an ad displayed per unit of time or during the entire campaign
• Brand Awareness — is the degree to which consumers recognize a product by its name 
• VTR — is the number of viewers who watched an entire video ad divided by the number of impressions, or people exposed to the video
• Post-view conversion — conversions that are made during 30 days (standard) after the user saw the ad but didn’t click on it

Media-funnel ad campaign KPI

In order to get the desired action and drive revenue for brands, it’s important to drive user engagement and attract users to a site to provide more information about their products. To evaluate the efficiency of this type of ad campaign, pay attention to the following KPIs:

• Traffic volume — the number of website visitors
• Page depth — the average number of pages the user views during one session
• Average session duration — average time the user spends on the website studying your offer
• Bounce rate — the number of users who don’t want to interact with the website and leave. Here we track whether users left immediately
• Reach — the number of unique users who saw the ad
• CTR — is the ratio of clicks to impressions on a mobile advertising campaign. 

Down-funnel sales ad campaign KPI

At this stage, advertising campaigns are aimed at getting desired actions, sales of brand products and services, and increase profit. KPIs for this stage: 

• Conversion rate — the percentage of users that made the target action on the website: made a purchase, left request, submitted application
• Conversions — the number of completed target actions: newsletter subscriptions, sending contact information, likes, etc.
• Last-click conversions — is the number of conversions that were attributed to the last channel that was before completing the target action (e.g. making a purchase)
• Assisted conversion — is the number of conversions that were attributed to the assisted channel. So, this channel assisted in completing the target action, but it wasn’t the last one.