Don’t get me wrong – digital KPIs are vital in understanding many pivotal aspects to our campaigns. They inform decisions to optimise audiences, channels, creatives, and many more advertising variables; such that costs can be scaled down and returns increased.
In order to avoid the KPI trap, marketers must truly know how to utilise the data brought forward by digital KPIs. They need to widen their horizons, and focus on a variety of KPIs, rather than one or two.
Remember that with digital, algorithms enables us to optimise campaigns for a particular goal – such as reach, clicks, impressions, video views, etc. By becoming overly focused on a single algorithmic goal, campaigns can soon become artificially constrained, driving up the cost of your qualified impressions. Optimising for keywords that bring in lower cost-per-clicks could effectively mean you’re losing our on getting clicks from hot prospects, who may carry a higher average cost-per-click (since more aggressive keywords are searched in smaller volumes than the vanilla ones).