4 Types of Bottom Funnel Metrics (+ How To Use Them To Analyse Performance)

Bottom funnel conversion (sales) campaigns are the bread and butter of every performance marketer and the beating heart of a company's (paid) sales engine. Optimising them means saving a lot of $$$ in wasted ad spend and redirecting it to more profitable ad opportunities.

Here are the relative metrics that you should be monitoring and optimising regularly for e-commerce campaigns in the decreasing order of priority.

Noting that I have excluded absolute metrics like Revenue, Transactions etc. as they have limited use for the purpose of regular optimisation.

Primary metrics:
- ROAS
- Conversion rate
- Cost/conversion
- % of budget spent relative to the % of campaign's time elapsed (budget pacing)

These are metrics that you should be looking at first when optimising conversion campaigns. While the first three metrics are pretty obvious, the fourth one in budget pacing allows you to ensure you have ads in the market throughout the duration of the campaign, especially during busier times.

Secondary metrics:
- Impression share (IS), IS lost by budget, and IS lost by rank (% of impression your campaign received relative to the total impression available, % of impressions lost due to insufficient budget, % of impressions lost due to poor ad quality)
- Click share (% of clicks your campaign received relative to the total clicks available)
- Click-through rate (CTR)
- Average cost per click (Avg. CPC)
- Average order value (AOV)
- % of new vs returning visitors

These metrics should be looked at after the primary metrics have been reviewed. % of new vs returning visitors could also be a primary metric depending on how important new or returning visitors are for your business.

Tertiary metrics:
- Bounce rate (% of sessions that were not engaged)
- Conversion rate ranking (how well your campaign converts relative to your competitors)

Tertiary metrics are relatively less important. However, they could be helpful when diagnosing performance issues.

Enhanced metrics:
- Cost per incremental conversion
- Conversion lift %

Enhanced metrics like the above are only available when running Conversion Lift studies. They are incredibly important to help you understand how showing your ads to your potential customers is driving incremental sales, incremental being the operating word.