I really enjoyed Jason Heller's piece in MediaPost on the topic of digital marketing performance metrics. His comments on creating a measurement framework that aligns goals to Key Performance Indicators were right on target.

However, how does he suggest accomplishing any of the measurement buckets in his model? He doesn't provide any details, so I took a stab at it.

It's all well and good to say “determine efficiency of Reach & Frequency,” "Engagement” or “Commerce Performance”, but in a branding campaign, how do you accomplish this?

If I may, I would suggest that you must first set up the campaign to best reach your target audience. Identify where they live and work to determine the volume of Impressions needed to saturate the market. Test your way into select markets with media tailored to their specific behaviors. Then gauge brand lift of awareness campaigns through non-cookie-based metrics, such as brand search. This would cover the Reach & Frequency bucket.

As far as Engagement, what your really concerned about here are the subsequent actions that come out of the engagement. So someone watched a video, or spends time noodling around on a landing page, great. You want to see these things. But then what?

It's critical that subsequent media is there to pick up the next phase of the Customer Journey, so you can understand the entire marketing funnel. While sales might not be a direct measured output of Awareness media, this type of campaign should create a domino effect that results in eventual sales. And there's your macro-economic Commerce metric.

I wonder if this is what Mr. Heller had in mind.