The handful of metrics that actually matter
How to measure paid media honestly, and how to choose the right advertising channels for your business rather than chasing whatever is loudest this quarter.
Measure what changes decisions
A dashboard with forty metrics is a dashboard nobody acts on. The metrics worth watching are the ones that would genuinely change a decision: whether you scale, hold, or cut. Everything else is context at best and noise at worst. Start from the decision, then choose the smallest set of numbers that informs it.
Return on ad spend is useful but dangerous in isolation. A high ROAS on branded search often just means you are paying to capture demand you already earned. A modest ROAS on prospecting might be creating the demand that makes the branded number look good. Read them together, or you will keep rewarding the wrong campaigns.
Choosing channels without the hype
Every platform will tell you it is the future. The useful question is narrower: where does your audience already spend attention with buying intent, and can you produce creative that fits that environment? A channel you cannot feed with good creative is a channel you will underperform on, no matter how promising the targeting looks on paper.
| Channel | Best for | Intent | Creative demand |
|---|---|---|---|
| Search | Capturing existing demand | High | Low |
| Paid social | Creating demand, prospecting | Medium | High |
| Video / short-form | Scale and brand-building | Lower | Very high |
| Retargeting | Closing warm audiences | High | Medium |
Attribution is a model, not the truth
No attribution setup is perfect, and treating any single model as gospel leads to bad calls. Use platform data for in-flight optimisation, but validate the big decisions with holdout tests and incrementality studies. The goal is not a tidy report — it is knowing which spend you could switch off tomorrow without losing the sale.
Measure and scale with the right kit
Explore the monitoring, analytics and reporting tools we recommend for keeping paid media honest.