The Field Guide to FieldTest: How to Interpret Your Campaign Data

The FieldTest Platform is designed to be the easiest way to build, target, and publish digital ads in minutes. Not only that, we give all of our clients the tools to not only build their ad campaigns but to monitor their performance so they know they are making the best decisions with their marketing. Still, with great freedom and power must come the knowledge of how to use it and many of our newer clients do find themselves at the driver’s seat wondering just how to put the tools we’re offering to their best possible use. Other clients may have a good understanding of the concepts at play and data being reported on the FieldTest platform but wonder just how their decisions are affecting them, how to interpret them and how to put them to use down the line in future campaigns. 

This week (on the FieldTest blog) we’re going to walk through the core KPIs reported on the FieldTest dashboard, a Field Guide to FieldTest if you will. We think this will help our newest clients understand just how powerful the FieldTest Platform is as an advertising tool, as well as giving our more experienced clients a road map to more effective optimization of their current campaigns and an idea how to set them up even better in the future. Let’s start with the first data point, and the one that most influences the rest, your Total Spend.

Spend

Your campaign spend may seem like a straightforward metric, but it really is one of the single biggest influences on the performance of your campaigns. If you come into your digital ad campaigns thinking about the FieldTest Platform as a simple button you push to make conversions come out the other end, you may find yourself disappointed due to a bad case of oversimplification. The simple reality is that digital advertising is an investment, and like most investments it gives back more return the more you invest in it.

This isn’t to say that every ad campaign needs to be given six figure funding to achieve good performance. Most successful campaigns run on the FieldTest platform do very well with between $2-10k monthly budgets, though many clients have found great success with much higher (and much lower) budgets. The important thing is to understand that you will see certain results change depending on the budget level that feels most comfortable for you. If you’re just starting out and running on a shoestring budget that’s not a problem, but you’ll need to be careful to spend that money wisely as you won’t have as much to reach far across the internet to find new customers and push them down the funnel (running awareness campaigns is always a good way for first time advertisers to drive traffic and set themselves up for success down the road).

Our platform is designed to deliver results for clients of any budget level. The important thing to remember is that your budget will drive results downstream downstream.

Impressions

Your impressions are another extremely important metric, the number of times one of your targeted intenders saw your ad online. This data point is the bellwether against which you will measure nearly all other KPIs on the FieldTest Platform to check their effectiveness. It works like this - Have a high percentage of clicks compared to your number of impressions? Pat yourself on the back, your ads are finely tuned and running efficiently. High impressions but low clicks? Time to take a look at your creative and see what you can improve. This metric is particularly useful in awareness as that stage is all about getting your name out in front of new customers, though you always want to make sure that your impressions are returning you our next metric:

Clicks

Clicks are the first major step your targeted intenders take towards becoming full blown customers and it is not one to be missed when interpreting your campaign data. Your clicks are important at every funnel stage as they are a leading indicator of ad creative that is engaging, well designed and fulfilling the needs of your intenders. 

In your upper funnel campaigns, clicks are important because they indicate traffic sent to your site. Every person who visits your site will trigger your pixel, which is critical to messaging your products to your intenders along each funnel stage, as well as helping to create powerful Lookalike Audiences for your mid-funnel campaigns.

In your lower funnel campaigns it will be extremely important to compare your clicks and CPC (more on that later) to your conversions, as high clicks on your conversion creatives but low final conversions may indicate an issue with your shopping pages or purchase page pixel. 

CTR

Remember how we mentioned it is important to compare your click rate to your impressions as an indicator of creative health? If you think that sounds a little complicated to do on your own then you are in luck, the CTR or Click-Through Rate metric tracks just that. Use this metric to track the long term creative health of your ad campaigns, and make decisions for future campaigns based on your learnings. That mobile tech intender group not really pick up on your DTC coffee brand, leaving you with low CTR? Maybe it’s time to try out another approach and test some new messages to some new intenders. 

CPM

Here at FIeldTest we have talked in the past about how, if Google and Facebook and the other big marketing platforms are “retail” advertising, then we are “wholesale”. This isn’t just because of our lower prices, more open reporting and expanded inventory, it’s also due to the sheer numbers of intenders we offer you access to who you can only reach with other platforms within the tiny constraints of their individual walled gardens. This of course means that your ads will often be delivered to millions of intenders, that’s a lot of data to deal with! Luckily, CPM is here to save the day and make things a lot more simple.

CPM, or Cost Per Mille (Latin for 1,000) if the cost you pay for 1,000 impressions. This gives you a handy cheat sheet to your ads’ overall deliverability, which are based on a couple of factors. First, it is based on your overall budget. Like we said up top, your budget will be one of the primary drivers of your performance down funnel, and without the spend to back it up you may find your ads withering on the vine. The other major factor here is your Bid Amount, set during campaign setup.  This is the amount you are willing to pay for the aforementioned 1,0000 impressions and the higher you set it the more likely you are to ensure that those impressions are delivered over other advertiser’s ads. You may set this high if you find yourself stuck in a competitive space and unable to break through the noise of competing advertisers, or you may set it low if you want to cater to a more modest budget. We set it to $4 by default because we have found that to be a “sweet spot”, but part of building a really great ad campaign is knowing just where to set your CPMs for success in your vertical. 

CPC

We mentioned before how your CTR makes crunching the numbers on your ad creative’s effectiveness simple. Still, it could always be simpler, andl your CPC, or Cost Per Click, is here to lend a hand in that department. Your Cost Per Click shows you just how much you are spending convincing your intenders to click on your ads. In context of your CPM Bid Amount, this should paint you a vivid picture of the effectiveness of your ads.

If your bid is set to $1 and your CPC is $10, that means that your indender groups are having to see your ads 10,000 times before finally clicking. If this is the case it may just be time to adjust your creative or targeting strategy (not to mention increase your Bid Amount, $1 inventory will not be the best which can affect CPC).

Conversions

Conversions are arguably the most important metric of them all, the final end goal of just about any digital ad campaign. Often Conversions get boiled down simply to sales, and for most campaigns that is the case, but the reality is that conversions can be any specific goal set in your marketing. Want to get people to sign up for a newsletter? Add a conversion pixel to your newsletter confirmation page and now your conversion tracker is showing you just that. Want to get people to listen to your band’s album on spotify? Add a conversion pixel to a pass-through page that sends them directly to it and now you’re getting a live view of people being sent to your content from the FieldTest campaign dashboard. Ultimately what you measure with conversions is up to you and your specific campaign goals, but at the end of the day conversions are the result of every move you’ve made up-stream, and this metric is a good one to watch to see if things are performing well.

CPA

We’ve talked about how your CPM indicates your campaigns deliverability by cost and how CPC indicates the health of your ad creative and audience targeting, making reading those metrics a breeze. Well CPA, or Cost Per Acquisition, measures that same efficacy but for your conversions. This metric will help you understand just how much you are spending to get your customers to convert, and can be read differently depending on the level of data you are analyzing as well as the cost of your product. Taking a meta look across all campaigns can be useful to get a broad view but you really need to look into this metric at the individual campaign level to diagnose what can be changed to alter it.

Broadly speaking, your upper funnel ads will have a much higher CPA than others as these campaigns are intended to simply get the word out about your brand and your products. Sure, there will be some people who find your product to be a complete home run and will purchase at the awareness level, but you shouldn’t expect that number to be too high while people are just getting to know you. 

Conversely, lower funnel campaigns will have a much lower CPA, since those campaigns are intended to be the final push to convert following several other rounds of creative moving them down-funnel. These campaigns are often funded comparatively lower than upper funnel campaigns as the “pump is already primed” so to speak and people are already interested in your products or have shown intent to purchase in the mid-funnel. A high CPA in this stage indicates a serious disconnect between your intenders and your messaging or creative, or maybe even a technical issue with your shopping page. Keep an close eye on it and you’ll be much happier with your results in the long run.

That marks the end of today’s Field Guide, but that shouldn’t end your thinking about what your performance metrics say about your campaigns. These data points all intermingle to create a unique tapestry that is your digital marketing and the more you understand them, and take command of them, the better. The FieldTest Platform puts the tools of professional advertisers into the hands of anyone willing to take the time to learn how to use them, and once they do we think they’ll find that our platform is one of the single most powerful digital advertising tools available online today. We can’t wait to see what you achieve with them!

Get in touch to find out how you can promote your brand with powerful digital ads on the FieldTest Platform