If you've been measuring marketing and advertising campaigns by the same benchmarks for several years, update them now to get an accurate picture of performance.
When was the last time your team evaluated your marketing benchmarks?
Don't get spooked; this is a safe space.
If those analytics docs have been collecting cobwebs, or if they still have Google+ goals, it's time for an update.
So, where should you start?
Set SMART goals for all your media campaigns
Yep, that trusty old mnemonic still holds water when it comes to planning your paid media campaigns for the upcoming quarter:
Specific - Exactly what is your business objective? What specific marketing objectives will ladder up to it? What actionable items will you take to fulfill those objectives, and why?
Measurable - If it gets measured, it gets managed. Determine the appropriate key performance indicators (KPIs) for each tactic used in your campaign and gather industry benchmarks so you know if your strategies are effective or not.
Achievable - Are you sure your goals are realistic? It's good to aim high, but if you set unrealistic goals, you're setting yourself up for unnecessarily negative results. Look at historical data and competitor analyses to see what's reasonable to expect.
Relevant - Are you sure your campaign ideas will effectively serve your short-term and long-term business goals? Are your metrics measuring the right variable?
Time-Bound - Set clear parameters around the timing of your campaigns and check in midway. Be sure you're measuring short-term KPIs earlier and long-term KPIs later.
Establish KPIs for each touchpoint in the journey
Top of funnel KPIs
Traditional upper funnel metrics like impressions and cost-per-mille (CPM) have served as foundational measurements in digital advertising, but they suffer from several key limitations:
They measure potential exposure rather than actual engagement
They don't account for viewability or attention quality
They provide no insight into brand perception changes
They can be artificially inflated by bot traffic and fraudulent activity
Brand lift studies have emerged as a more meaningful measure of upper-funnel impact by measuring actual changes in:
Brand awareness
Brand consideration
Purchase intent
Brand preference
Message association
These measurements provide concrete evidence of how advertising affects consumer perceptions and behavior, rather than just counting potential exposures.
Attention-based measurements also offer deeper insight into actual engagement:
Active attention time
Viewability duration
Scroll velocity
Audio engagement
Interactive events
A/B tests by The Attention Council showed that attention optimizations led to 20% higher unique reach than viewability optimizations, and they were 31% more cost-efficient.
Mid-funnel media measurements
These metrics indicate how deeply prospects are engaging with your brand's ads and messaging, suggesting progression from passive awareness to active consideration.
Common mid-funnel marketing KPIs include:
Content engagement metrics like average time on page, pages per session, video completion rates (VCR), social media shares and saves, etc.
Lead quality indicators for B2B marketing like marketing qualified leads (MQLs), email engagement rates, newsletter subscription retention, lead magnet download rates, etc.
Interactive engagement like AI chatbot or price calculator usage, sample or demo requests, wishlist or cart additions, etc.
Lower-funnel conversion metrics
These are the fun ones! Lower-funnel metrics look at actual conversions or strong indications of purchase intent. They can also measure a marketing campaign's impact on overall brand revenue and long-term value.
There are direct revenue metrics like conversion rate, customer acquisition cost (CAC), and return on ad spend (ROAS, which we use quite a bit).
But let's drill down on an imperative and often overlooked variable: customer lifetime value (CLV).
Customer lifetime value (CLV) is the total revenue a business can expect from a customer throughout their entire relationship, minus the costs of acquiring and serving them. It helps companies understand which customers are most valuable over time, rather than just looking at individual purchase amounts. Think of it as calculating the long-term profitability of a customer relationship instead of focusing on one-time transactions.
CLV is important to media planning because, as our Managing Director Talia Arnold explains often,
"When it comes to advertising, focusing too closely on short-term gains is like day trading — the quick returns might grab headlines, but they usually lack staying power. Sustainable business growth requires pairing performance with building brand equity, brick by brick, just like you’d invest in a retirement account."
By choosing the right KPIs for each channel in your media campaign, you can evaluate whether your paid media investments are paying off and how to optimize them going forward.
Gather marketing benchmarks for comparison
To establish your campaign benchmarks, look at trusted third-party sources. You can glean insights from industry reports, case studies, and other data-driven content.
Good metrics and benchmarks should derive from:
Historical Data
Analyze past performance trends to set a baseline for future expectations.
Industry-wide Data
Understand where you stand compared to competitors and identify potential areas for improvement.
For 2025, Sprout Social released this set of social media guidelines by industry. Look for similar guides for other channels from EMARKETER, Nielsen, Numerator, Statista, etc.
Platform-specific benchmarks
Meta, Google, LinkedIn, and other media channels usually offer their own sets of platform-specific benchmarks so you know what kind of performance is typical in those environments.
Partner/Vendor Guidelines
Remember that there may be a conflict of interest, however, as they often aim to portray high performance.
Analyze and Report
The marketing benchmark analysis cycle begins with regular performance reviews where teams assess current metrics against industry standards using executive dashboards and team scorecards.
During these reviews, conduct gap analysis to identify variances from benchmarks, which should be documented in structured variance reports.
Use trend identification to spot patterns over time, displaying these in trend analysis reports that help contextualize current performance.
This analysis feeds into opportunity sizing and risk assessment, which should be reflected in competitive comparison reports to help stakeholders understand market position.
Finally, translate insights into resource allocation and action planning, supported by ROI assessments and budget impact reports. This creates a continuous feedback loop where reporting directly informs the next round of analysis and decision-making.
At Exverus, we hold quarterly health checks with all our clients and provide them with quarterly business reports (QBRs) so they know exactly how their ad spend is performing. We're agile and nimble enough to quickly pivot or reallocate budget as needed mid-campaign.
If you've been neglecting to update your marketing benchmarks this year, go schedule that meeting! Your business depends upon it.
This piece originally appeared in our weekly Paid Media Insights newsletter. For more tips, research, and analysis; subscribe for free here.
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