KPIs give you powerful insight into your advertising performance. Unfortunately, setting KPI goals can be hard, and gathering KPI performance data can be even harder.  As a result, advertisers and agencies often fail to exploit KPIs because “the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.”

What if you could get clean advertising KPIs without all the work? Would you use KPIs in every campaign? Would it eliminate work and free up time? Would it help you to optimize your advertising investments and get better performance?

This article shows how Bionic can simplify and automate your advertising KPIs.

KPI Setting is #1 Problem Area

According to ID Comms, KPI Setting is biggest opportunity for media training.

The ID Comms 2019 Global Media Training Report revealed “KPI Setting” is the #1 area of media training that would add the greatest value to brands. In fact, 62% of respondents indicate that KPI setting is the biggest knowledge gap, up from 55% in 2016.  As you can see from the chart below, KPI setting dwarfs the importance of many other important areas such as media planning, media auditing, and agency management.

What are KPIs?

KPIs are the Key Performance Indicators that measure the success of your advertising initiatives.

When investing in media placements for advertising, it can be difficult to choose KPIs that properly represent the success of the advertising.  Unlike financial investing, where return on investment is a universal and agreed upon primary measure of success, media investing has no such universal measure.  While many strive for ROI as a goal, it’s often unreliable, difficult, or impossible to measure ROI.  This is because many ads and other factors will contribute to a sale or transaction.  And that one transaction doesn’t capture the lifetime value created by the advertising.

Instead, marketers rely on myriad KPIs to measure the success of the advertising. For example, for a digital advertisement, you might use cost, impressions, and website visits as your KPIs. For most KPIs there’s a related “cost per whatever” efficiency metric.  For impressions, there’s cost per thousand impressions. For website visits, there’s cost per visit. Marketers typically have history and benchmarks of these cost efficiency metrics.

The problem with using a variety of KPIs is it multiplies the amount of work you need to do to set the KPI goals, to gather the performance data against those goals, and to analyze performance against those goals. The workload associated with KPIs is so daunting that it’s often ignored. As a result, many marketers are “flying blind” with their advertising.

But it doesn’t have to be this way…

Setting KPIs Can Be Automated

Bionic’s award-winning media planning and media investment management systems will automate the process of setting and tracking your advertising KPIs.

Choosing your KPIs

At the start of every campaign, advertising best practices dictate you should set your advertising KPIs and goals. Bionic enables you to select your KPIs from its database of more than 80 industry-standard KPIs.

Bionic enables you to choose from 80+ industry-standard KPIs

Setting Efficiency Goals

Bionic also enables you to set your default “cost per whatever” efficiency goals for every KPI. These defaults will automatically flow into your media plans.

Bionic helps you set your KPI efficiency goals.

Automating KPI Calculations

Bionic automatically calculates KPI goals for each of the placements in your media plan. Bionic will first calculate the cost of each media placement. Then, it will use your efficiency metrics to calculate your KPI goals.

Bionic automatically calculates your KPI goals.

Although it pulls in your defaults, you have full control of your KPIs on a placement-by-placement basis. You can exclude KPIs where they don’t make sense. For example, it does not make sense to measure clicks on a subway print advertisement. You can also override the default cost efficiency goal or calculated KPI goal.

Summarize your KPIs

You will see a summary of your KPIs at the bottom of your media plan. You can visualize your KPIs through beautiful flowcharts.

Bionic enables you to display KPIs on your advertising flowcharts.

You can report on your KPIs through insightful advertising schedules.

Bionic enables you to report on your KPIs in a matrix-style schedule.

Breaking Down KPIs Is Fundamental

The visualizations and reports you see above would not be possible without a lot of automation behind the scenes that breaks down your KPIs. Bionic automatically breaks down each KPI for each media placement into day-by-day goals.  So, if your placement spans 90 days, it will take the overall goal that you set for the placement and break it into 90 interim goals, one for each day your placement is running.

This process of breaking down your KPIs is straightforward if your placement is evenly paced from a start date to an end date.  You simply divide your KPI by the number of days between the start date and end date.

However, the process of breaking down your KPIs gets complicated quickly if you are flighting your placements, have hiatus periods, or do weekparting.

Regardless of the complexity, the job of breaking down your KPIs is a ton of work because you must do this for every KPI for every day for every placement for every campaign. So, if you are running 5 annual campaigns each with 20 placements each with 3 KPIs, that’s 5 x 365 x 20 x 3 = 109,500 calculations!

Clearly, you don’t want to do this work by hand.  Bionic will do this for you and store it cleanly in a database.

Bionic automatically breaks your advertising KPI goal into daily goals.

Automate KPI Performance Tracking

Bionic will also help you to measure your performance against these goals.

Bionic automates the process of gathering and standardizing your performance data. Bionic pulls data from your marketing systems.  Bionic provides standard integrations with the most popular platforms and supports custom and proprietary integrations.

Bionic then calculates the variance between your goals and your actual performance and presents it visually through performance reports

Bionic gives you a clean, honest view of your performance against your advertising KPIs.

Bionic gives you tools to analyze your advertising performance against KPIs.

and pacing reports.

With Bionic, you can visualize your advertising KPI performance.

How to Get Started with Bionic

If you are creating media plans and setting KPIs, Bionic for Agencies is the tool you need. If you oversee an advertising budget and want to monitor your KPI performance more closely, Bionic for Advertisers will help you in your quest.