Measuring Marketing Effectiveness: KPIs and Metrics for Success

Measuring the effectiveness of marketing campaigns isn’t just about reporting numbers—it’s about demonstrating real impact and driving strategic decisions. Whether you’re working with clients or internal stakeholders, having a robust framework for measuring marketing effectiveness is essential for proving value and optimizing future efforts.

Importance of Goal Setting

Before launching any marketing campaign, establishing clear, measurable goals is crucial. Without defined objectives, it’s impossible to determine whether your efforts were successful. Proper goal setting serves several key purposes:

• Provides direction and focus for campaign strategy
• Creates accountability for marketing teams and agencies
• Allows for informed optimization during campaign execution
• Demonstrates ROI and value to clients and stakeholders
• Builds institutional knowledge for future campaigns

The Role of Research

Marketing research is uniquely suited for establishing and tracking goals. The types of goals you set and how success is measured is largely dependent on the type of study deployed.

Pre/Post Campaign Surveys

Pre/post campaign surveys are excellent tools for measuring changes in awareness, perception, or intent. When setting goals for these surveys, consider:

• Establishing baseline metrics before campaign launch
• Defining specific percentage increases in key metrics
• Accounting for external factors that might influence results
• Setting realistic timeframes for post-campaign measurement

Longitudinal Surveys

For tracking changes over extended periods, longitudinal surveys provide valuable insights. Goals should focus on:

• Identifying trends and patterns in consumer behavior
• Measuring sustained impact rather than short-term spikes
• Establishing milestones for progress assessment
• Determining when intervention may be necessary

Message and Creative Testing Surveys

When testing different messages or creative approaches, goals should center around:

• Comparative performance metrics between the presented concepts
• Minimum thresholds for effectiveness
• Identifying optimal audience segments for each approach

Metrics and KPIs

Now that we’ve discussed how to set goals in your research, let’s explore some of the metrics and KPIs we help our clients track and measure.

Standard Benchmarks

These widely-used metrics provide standardized ways to measure consumer sentiment and brand health. They can often be measured against publicly available industry data to provide a quick gut check on how you’re brand is performing relative to the competition.

• Net Promoter Score (NPS): Measures customer loyalty and likelihood to recommend
• Customer Satisfaction (CSAT): Gauges overall satisfaction with a product, service, or experience
• Brand Awareness: Measures the percentage of your target audience that recognizes your brand
• Brand Perception: Evaluates how consumers view your brand across various attributes

Behavioral Metrics

Behavioral metrics focus on what consumers intend to do as a result of your marketing efforts:

• Purchase Intent: Measures likelihood to buy in the near future
• Consideration: Evaluates whether consumers would include your brand in their decision-making process
• Specific Behavioral Intentions: Such as likelihood to quit tobacco or adopt healthy behaviors
• Actual Behavior Change: Measuring real actions taken through integration with sales data or follow-up research

Brand and Campaign Recall

Memory-based metrics help determine if your marketing is making a lasting impression:

• Unaided Recall: Measures whether consumers remember your brand or campaign without prompting
• Aided Recall: Evaluates recognition when shown or told about the brand or campaign
• Message Association: Determines if consumers connect key messages with your brand
• Attribution: Measures whether consumers correctly attribute marketing to your brand

Scoring Rubrics

Sometimes a single metric isn’t enough to capture complex concepts. Scoring rubrics combine multiple questions to create composite measurements:

• Empathy Scales: Like the Toronto Empathy Scale, which combines responses across a 16-question matrix to compute a standardized empathy score
• Brand Health Indices: Composite scores that combine awareness, perception, and consideration metrics
• Customer Experience Scores: Aggregated metrics that evaluate the total customer journey
• Custom Scoring Systems: Tailored to specific campaign objectives or industry needs

My Favorite Metrics

All of these metrics have their place, depending on the project’s goals, but my personal favorites are Net Promoter Score and scoring rubrics.

I love using Net Promoter Score because it can be benchmarked against industry standards and leading competitors, applies a stronger weight to Detractors since anyone rating a 6 or below is likely going to have something negative to say, but most importantly I love NPS because we always follow it up with “Why did you give that rating?” This enables us to add color to the score, explain why some customers love the brand and others do not, and provide our clients with a roadmap on tangible things they can work on.

Scoring rubrics are a more recent favorite of mine. One of the most meaningful projects I’ve had the privilege to work on was a year-long public health campaign aimed at reducing substance abuse, sexual violence, and adverse childhood experiences. Our initial qualitative research revealed a lack of empathy towards these situations, resulting in those who have experienced pain or trauma keeping it to themselves for fear of shame and judgement. Over the following year, we tracked and measured empathy levels through a series of online surveys using the Toronto Empathy Scale as our KPI. By the end of the campaign, our research gave both the ad agency and end client proof that our target audience was indeed more empathetic through a statistically significant increase in empathy scores.

Best Practices

Even the most sophisticated metrics are only as good as the data they’re based on. To ensure your measurement approach delivers reliable insights you must ensure quality sample and questionnaire design (i.e. asking the right people the right questions).

At Evolve, we accomplish this through our PAWS model. Every project starts with clearly defined goals and objectives to ensure we ask the right questions using the most appropriate methodology, resulting in strategic insights to enact true behavior change.

Want to take your marketing efforts to the next level and be a rockstar in the board room? Let’s talk!