3 Underrated Marketing Metrics Worth Tracking as KPIs
- Nathan Leverette
- Oct 23
- 5 min read
We all know what a click is, and anyone who has talked about marketing for more than five minutes understands customer acquisition cost. Within the interface of any digital advertising platform, however, there are literally dozens of metrics available to sift through; some seemingly redundant and some hyper-specific. Depending on a given person’s comfort level, they may stick to the default metrics and never venture beyond them for fear of overcomplicating reports and confusing their clients.
Underutilized and unappreciated, other metrics can provide valuable insight, yet often sit neglected, like the Island of Misfit Toys (shout out to the classic 1960s Rudolph special). Without giving away any of our own secret sauce here, we’ll give you three underrated metrics, what they mean, and how they can help inform your strategy.
Misunderstood Metrics and How They Can Help You
The three we’ll be unpacking are below; click one to jump ahead:
Frequency
Frequency is the average number of times that your audience saw an ad or group of ads in a given period. What’s the right number for frequency? Like everything, it depends on what you’re trying to accomplish, but we all know what too high feels like when we experience it ourselves.
Say you browsed an online store and looked at a shirt, then left the site and went about your business, only to be bombarded with ads for that same shirt over the next week. Every site you visit, every newsfeed you scroll, filled with ads for the shirt to the point where you go “okay, okay, I get it.”
Obviously the advertiser wants to stay in front of the people who showed interest in the product, but they shouldn’t be annoying. Using example numbers, if the frequency for that ad over a week is 50.2, it means the average person in their audience is seeing the ad 50 times that week, so 7-8 times per day. If that’s not translating into more sales than when the frequency was lower, that could be a sign that the ad is oversaturating, and they could possibly reduce their budget.
When the opposite happens, and the advertiser is targeting too broadly on a small budget and the frequency is something like 1.3 over the week, that means the average person in the audience saw the ad only once. Showing an ad to someone just once is probably not enough to stay top of mind.
Frequency isn’t an available metric on every platform because some don't require users to be logged in, but for those that do (eg. social media), it’s a helpful clue as to how saturated your ads are, which informs whether you may want to scale up or down.
Impression Share
Often shortened to “IS”, impression share is the number of ad impressions received divided by the estimated number of impressions for which the ads were eligible, expressed as a percentage.
Let’s take the jargon out and get practical to picture what this means using a simple example.
Say you’re targeting one specific keyword on Google Ads, and within the location you are targeting, people search using that keyword 200 times per day. Those are searches where your ad could potentially show, so 200 impressions are up for grabs. Let’s also say your daily budget is $100, and the average cost-per-click is $5, meaning you only have the budget for 20 clicks, so you aren’t going to capture all 200 available searches. Not every ad impression results in a click though, so factor in your click-through rate - let’s use 20% CTR for this example - and if you got 20 clicks, you would have gotten 100 impressions that day. This means that of the 200 potential impressions, your ad showed up for 100 of them, making your impression share 50%.
But if you’re not going to show up for all of the impressions, then who/what decides when you will? In fact, that’s one of the most commonly asked questions we encounter - especially with newer clients - wondering why they didn’t see their ad when they went looking for it in the wild, and we discuss the various reasons why you don't always see your search ad when looking for it in this post. It’s a fair question; you search using the targeted keywords to see if your ad shows up, and it’s not there. What’s up with that?
In short, the reason is not always that you were limited by budget, but the algorithm has many factors at its disposal informing whether they should show your ad in a given moment. Maybe your recent browsing behavior revealed to Google that you aren’t actually a customer (the algorithm is clever, and they can figure out things about users based on behavior, patterns, IP addresses, etc), so why would they show your ad to you instead of potential customers? If the goal is to optimize for conversions, and an employee of the company is unlikely to contact the business or transact after seeing their own ad, showing the ad to that person would be a waste of money.
It’s not like buying a billboard, where your ad is in the same spot round-the-clock. After you layer on your various settings to narrow down your targeting, there are only so many instances where your ads are eligible to show up, and impression share indicates what percent of them your ad actually did.
Impression share lower than 100% doesn’t mean something is wrong, but much like frequency, it gives you an idea of how saturated your presence is within your current targeting, and a lower IS percentage indicates potential to capture more available impressions.
Engagement Rate
A gauge of essentially how intentional the visitors were in a given period, engagement rate is the percentage of sessions that were defined as “engaged” in GA4 and other analytics tools.
Engaged sessions are those for which at least one of these occurred when a user visited a website:
They browsed 2 or more pages
Their visit lasted more than 10 seconds
They completed at least 1 key event (aka conversion, be it a phone call, form completion, whatever you have defined)
If any of those criteria occurred in 3 out of 10 sessions, the engagement rate would be 30%.
It serves almost as a reframing or upgrade on the bounce rate metric, which is notoriously misunderstood because it assumes too much. If someone came to a landing page and got everything they needed without having to browse around, there was no need to go to another page, but that's still classified as a bounce, despite them having a good experience. In that case, a bounce is not a bad thing, yet people always pointed to high bounce rates being a problem. Classifying sessions as engaged allows for more nuance.
With engagement rate, you can isolate any segment you like, such as primary channel or referring domain, to compare how intentional each traffic source is, thus informing your acquisition strategy.
So What?
At the risk of sounding old-fashioned, this author had a chuckle while writing and remembering how CTR and CPC used to be cutting-edge metrics. We evaluated the success of our online advertising in a simpler way, and to some, that was good enough, but the truth is there’s more nuance to any campaign’s performance.
Context is key, and there are more tools at our disposal than ever to lend insight about performance. Knowing when to look at a given metric and how to interpret what it’s saying is a vital part of data analysis.
While it’s not possible to read the minds of every individual in your marketing funnel and wave a magic wand to make them all instantly convert, evaluating your campaigns in context can uncover trends and provide clues for how to achieve future success.
If you would like a second opinion on the reporting that you receive from your current ads provider, or would like to see an example of the dashboards we create for our clients, ask away! Making sense of numbers is a big part of what we do.
