The Vanity Metric Problem

Likes, followers, impressions, reach, shares — these are the metrics that dominate most marketing reports. They're easy to measure, they trend in a positive direction most of the time, and they're satisfying to present to a room. They're also largely useless for understanding whether your marketing is actually contributing to business growth.

The fundamental problem is that vanity metrics measure activity, not outcomes. A campaign can generate 5 million impressions and zero new customers. A campaign can grow your Instagram following by 10,000 people and produce no measurable increase in brand consideration among your target audience. The numbers look good; the business doesn't move.

What Brand Campaigns Are Actually Trying to Move

A brand campaign has one of three strategic objectives: building awareness (more people knowing you exist), driving consideration (more people seeing you as a credible choice), or converting preference into purchase intent (more people choosing you over alternatives). Each objective requires different measurement.

For awareness campaigns: Aided and unaided brand recall (measured through brand tracking surveys), share of voice in your category, and search volume uplift for brand terms during the campaign period.

For consideration campaigns: Quality of website traffic (time on site, pages viewed, return visits), enquiry volume from brand-aware audiences, and net promoter score movement among recent awareness-stage contacts.

For conversion campaigns: Cost per qualified lead, lead-to-customer conversion rate, revenue attributable to the campaign, and customer acquisition cost.

The Metrics That Actually Tell You Something

Building a Measurement Framework That Works

Start by defining what success looks like for the business — not for the marketing channel. What does the business need marketing to deliver? More high-quality leads? Higher average order value? Faster sales cycles? Improved retention? Every marketing metric should connect, at least indirectly, to one of those business outcomes.

Then build a measurement stack that captures both leading indicators (signals that the campaign is working before you can see the business outcome) and lagging indicators (the actual business outcomes). Leading indicators help you optimise in-campaign. Lagging indicators tell you whether the overall strategy is working.

AX Creative's Approach to Campaign Measurement

At AX Creative, we define measurement frameworks at the brief stage — before any creative is produced. This forces clarity on what success actually looks like for each campaign, and ensures the measurement infrastructure (tracking, survey methodology, attribution) is in place before the campaign launches rather than retrofitted afterwards.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do you measure brand awareness effectively?

The gold standard is brand tracking — regular surveys measuring aided recall, unaided recall and brand consideration among your target audience. For smaller budgets, search volume tracking for brand terms and social listening for brand mention volume are useful proxies.

How do you attribute revenue to brand campaigns?

Brand campaigns build awareness and consideration that converts over months, not days. Attribution requires comparing sales velocity, conversion rates and customer acquisition cost in markets or periods with brand investment versus without. Multi-touch attribution models help but aren't perfect. Brand lift studies (available through Meta and Google) provide direct measurement of campaign impact on consideration and purchase intent.

What's a good engagement rate for brand content?

Benchmark varies significantly by platform and audience size. On Instagram, 1–3% is average for brand accounts; above 5% is strong. On LinkedIn, 2–5% is average. On TikTok, benchmarks are higher — 3–7% is typical, with strong content exceeding 10%. More important than hitting a benchmark is whether your engagement rate is trending positively over time.