Running online ads can be scary. Spending money before you know whether a campaign will work takes a lot of risk tolerance. But as Mark Zuckerberg once said, “the biggest risk is not taking any risk.” In today’s digital world, avoiding advertising altogether often means missing out on growth that your competitors are already capitalizing on.

Digital advertising isn’t guesswork. It’s one of the most measurable, controllable, and scalable forms of marketing, and it works for businesses of every size, from small local shops to big national brands.

That said, successful campaigns don’t happen by accident. You need to know which key performance indicators (KPIs) to track. KPIs are simply the metrics that show whether your ads are working.

Step One: Define Your Advertising Goal

Before picking KPIs, you need to decide what you want from your campaign. This comes down to the marketing funnel. The marketing funnel illustrates how customers move from learning about your business to actually buying from you.

Awareness and Consideration Campaigns

Awareness and consideration campaigns are for building visibility and warming up potential buyers. They work best for:

• Brick-and-mortar businesses that can’t optimize for online sales
• Brands with very small budgets
• Companies that already run sales campaigns but want more brand recognition
• Businesses selling through retailers

Common goals here are awareness, website traffic, and engagement.

These campaigns are hard to tie directly to sales. You may need customer surveys, interviews, or long-term sales data to truly understand the impact. Still, the KPIs worth tracking include:

• Impressions: How many times your ad is shown
• Traffic: How many people visit your site from the ad
• CTR (Click-Through Rate): The percentage of people who click your ad
• Video View-Through Rate: How many people watch your video to the end
• CPM (Cost Per 1,000 Impressions): How much it costs to show your ad 1,000 times
• Engagement: Likes, comments, shares, saves, and other interactions

Lead Campaigns

For service businesses or those selling high-ticket items, it’s tough to get cold traffic to buy right away. Instead, you’ll want to capture leads and follow up.

The KPIs here are:

• CPL (Cost Per Lead): How much you spend to get one lead
• Lead Flow: Are you getting leads at a steady enough pace for campaigns to optimize?
• CLV (Customer Lifetime Value): The total revenue a customer brings over time
• CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost): The total cost of gaining a new customer
• ROAS (Return on Ad Spend): Revenue earned for every $1 spent on ads

Conversion Campaigns

Conversion campaigns aim to sell products directly and feed customer data directly back to the platform so it can find more buyers like them. These are often considered the gold standard for performance marketers because the KPI is directly tied to revenue.

The key KPIs are:

• CPA (Cost Per Acquisition): How much it costs to win a paying customer
• CLV (Customer Lifetime Value): How valuable that customer is over time
• ROAS (Return on Ad Spend): Revenue earned for every $1 spent on ads

Bringing It All Together

Digital advertising doesn’t have to feel like a gamble. By defining your goals and tracking the right KPIs, you can turn ad spend into a measurable, controllable path to growth. Whether you’re focused on awareness, lead generation, or direct sales, understanding your numbers gives you the confidence to scale what works and cut what doesn’t.

In the end, the brands that win aren’t the ones who spend the most; they’re the ones who measure, learn, and optimize every step of the way. If you’d like help building a winning campaign for your brand, Power Couch Media is the go-to agency for measurable and scalable digital advertising. Schedule a call today to see if we’re a good fit for your business.