How can you be sure that your ad was effective?
Was it the click? The impression? The sale a week later? Or was it the subtle brand recall that resulted in a purchase months later?
In the AdTech universe, where every impression, view, and conversion are monitored, achievement isn’t as much a product of gut feel anymore. It’s quantifiable in cold hard facts. The trick is not in merely having the facts—but knowing which to pay attention to, when, and why.
With multiple devices, platforms, and user paths at play, ad performance measurement is both art and science. This blog breaks down the most crucial metrics in ad tech, how they differ across formats, and what tools make sense of the signals amidst the noise.
Let’s break it down.
The Foundation: Common Performance Metrics
Centred in most online campaigns are five core metrics. These are the fundamentals, which marketers utilize to measure success:
1. CPM (Cost Per Mille or Thousand Impressions)
This indicates the cost you are paying to show 1,000 ad impressions. It is particularly useful when running brand awareness campaigns, where the focus is on exposure rather than clicks.
2. CPC (Cost Per Click)
Used to gauge performance-based campaigns, CPC informs you how much you’re spending on each user clicking on your advert. It is a straightforward indicator of the extent to which your creative and targeting are collaborating effectively.
3. CPA (Cost Per Acquisition or Action)
This gets deeper still—tracking cost per conversion. Whether sign-up, purchase, or app installation, CPA offers insight into the effectiveness with which your campaign is driving results rather than traffic.
4. CTR (Click-Through Rate)
Computed by dividing clicks by impressions, CTR is a relevance measure. High CTR typically indicates that your ad reached the right audience with the right message.
5. ROAS (Return on Ad Spend)
Quite possibly the most royal of all e-commerce brand metrics, ROAS informs you of how much money your campaign earned for each rupee or dollar spent. A ROAS of 5, for example, implies that you got $5 in revenue for each $1 spent.
Each one of them has a job—but only trusting one can be deceptive. The magic is when you view them collectively, in the bigger picture.
Not All Screens Are Equal: Format-Specific Metrics
As much as various channels require various forms of storytelling, they also require various measures of success.
Display Ads
Being commonly utilized in awareness or retargeting contexts, display ads thrive when there is high viewability and CTR. View-through conversions (users who viewed but did not click the advertisement and converted downstream) are similarly important.
Video Ads
Here, completion rate (what percentage of people watched your video to the end) becomes critical. Engagement rate and brand lift studies are also trending—particularly for YouTube and OTT platforms.
Mobile Advertising
Install rate, retention rate (Day 1, Day 7), and in-app actions are the metrics that come into focus. Success with mobile ads is highly dependent on app behavior and not so much ad interaction.
CTV (Connected TV)
CTV is missing the click-driven universe of online ads. Instead, they use metrics such as completion rate, incremental reach, and household-level attribution to measure effectiveness.
Measurement isn’t one-size-fits-all, in short. The same ad on mobile, web, and TV may require three distinct sets of KPIs to accurately tell the whole story.
The Bigger Picture: Viewability, Attribution & Incrementality
Viewability
If an ad runs below the fold and the user never even looks at it, did it actually run? Sites now employ viewability metrics to measure whether the ad actually reached the screen long enough to be seen. For display, 50% of the ad needs to be visible for one second, and two seconds for video, by IAB standards.
Attribution Models
Did the Facebook ad close the deal? Or was it the Google search that followed?
Attribution models help assign credit to various touchpoints along a user’s journey. Typical models include:
- Last-click (credit given to the last touchpoint)
- First-click (credit given to first exposure)
- Linear (equal credit to all touchpoints)
- Data-driven (AI assigns credit based on actual behavior)
Selecting the correct attribution model can radically shift how you measure your campaign’s ROI.
Incrementality
This measures the real effect of advertising by asking: “Would this conversion have occurred without the ad?”
A/B testing, geo split tests, and holdout groups measure incremental lift. It’s a strong metric—particularly in established markets where every impression incurs an expense.
Decoding Performance: Tools and Platforms
You don’t have to do everything by yourself. AdTech today is full of tools that assist in gathering, visualizing, and analyzing ad data.
Some Popular Platforms That Are Used Are:
- Google Analytics 4 (GA4) – Follows user paths across websites and apps.
- Meta Ads Manager – Provides granular breakdowns for Facebook and Instagram ad campaigns.
- Google Ads & DV360 – For search, YouTube, and programmatic purchasing insights.
- Adjust / Appsflyer / Branch – Mobile measurement partners for app install and attribution tracking.
- MOAT / IAS / DoubleVerify – Measure viewability, fraud detection, and brand safety.
- Tableau / Looker / Power BI – Data visualization tools to enable marketers to transform raw data into actionable dashboards.
With data clean rooms and CDPs (Customer Data Platforms), advertisers can now also bring first-party data from various sources together while remaining privacy-compliant.
Conclusion: Beyond the Metrics
Yes, clicks matter. Conversions matter. But excellent advertising isn’t a numbers game. It’s a marriage of art and analytics, message and measurement.
Metrics are your north star—sensing the direction you need to go. But they are most useful only when combined with unambiguous objectives, channel approaches, and insights into people.
In AdTech’s ever-changing landscape, the true measurement of success goes beyond performance—impact. And that impact has little to do with dashboards. It exists in the imagination and recollections of your public.
And the next time you’re analyzing a campaign, don’t merely ask what it did—ask why it worked. That’s where the true learning is.
