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

Top funnel (awareness) and middle funnel (engagement) campaigns are demand-generation engines keeping the brand growth vehicle going, especially during times of economic turmoil.

Here are the relative metrics that you should be monitoring and optimising across these campaigns, in the decreasing order of priority.

I have excluded absolute metrics like Impressions, Clicks etc. as they have limited use for the purpose of regular optimisation.

Primary metrics:

*Awareness*
- Change in share of voice
- Change in brand searches
- Change in brand mentions
- Change in brand sentiment
- Viewable CPM (Cost per mille aka cost per 1000 impressions)
- View rate (number of times the ad was viewed by the number of times it was shown)
- CPV (Cost per view)


*Consideration*
- Cost per engagement
- Engagement rate
- Viewable CTR (CTR of only the ads that were viewable)
- % 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 awareness and consideration campaigns. Views-related metrics like vCPM, View rate, CPV and Viewable CTR are super important as not ads are created equal (read: most ads are not viewed, or at least not most of the times)

Secondary metrics:
- Average impr. freq./user
- Measurable rate (% of impressions that could be measured)
- Viewable rate (number of times the ad was considered viewable)
- Video played to: 25%, 50%, 75%, 100%

These metrics supplement the primary metrics. If you have not set frequency cap for your campaign/account, average impr. freq./user becomes important and could be treated like a primary metric.

Tertiary metrics:

- Non-viewable impr. %
- Non-measurable impr. %
- Avg. watch time/impr (avg. time spend watching a video ad per impression)

Tertiary metrics are relatively less important. However, they could be helpful when diagnosing issues or gaining additional insights.

Enhanced metrics:
- Cost per incremental brand/Consideration lift
- Brand/Consideration lift %

Enhanced metrics like the above are only available when running Brand Recall/Consideration Lift studies. When executed well, these lift studies and resulting metrics can't deliver rich insights and help lay the foundation of an excellent brand strategy.

P.S I excluded NPS as it's predominantly a loyalty metric.