In his blog last month, celebrated Web guru, Google Analytics evangelist and hyperbole super-fan Avinash Kaushik outlined ongoing challenges with his war against reporting aggregated, “high-level” metrics as they are, in his own words: “crap.” They simply don’t drive business decisions because they can’t suggest why something is happening. A good report contains metrics that:

• Speak to specific business goals that support specific key performance indicators (KPIs)
• Support a future action that will help a website better attain a business goal, and in doing so affect the organization’s KPIs

Measuring Success for Central Market’s Passport Argentina Campaign
We kept Avinash’s general thoughts in mind as we analyzed the results of a recent partnership with Central Market. From May 12-25, Central Market brought Argentine culture to central Texas through their Passport Argentina campaign, which featured Argentine wines and cuisine, special guests, blog posts and special cooking classes.

To help promote the campaign, Springbox developed and optimized a series of Passport Argentina-themed Facebook ads with the primary objectives of driving traffic to the site and increasing brand awareness — increasing brand awareness was an especially important goal. 

We ran and managed the ads from May 14 to May 25. To gauge our success at driving traffic, we looked at overall visits by source — hoping to see the amount of referral traffic on par with or better than their consistent pay-per-click source: DoubleClick. To measure success at improving brand awareness, we looked at three key engagement metrics:

• Depth of visit (pages per visit)
• Length of visit (average time on site)
• Percent of visits that came from new visitors — since those persons would represent an increase in market awareness 

Passport Argentina Ads Result in 22% More New Visitors than Comparable Pay-Per-Click Source
During the Passport Argentina campaign, Springbox’s Facebook ads were the fourth most common source of traffic — driving 7,049 visits to the site, which wasn’t far off from the 7,560 visits brought in by DoubleClick. But when we looked at who was referred by the two sources and how they behaved once they hit Central Market’s site, the incremental benefits of Springbox’s ads surfaced.
 
The traffic sent from our Argentina-themed ads:

• Averaged 34% more pages per visit
• Spent 25% longer on the site 

And, most importantly, Springbox’s Argentina-themed Facebook ads brought in 22% more new visitors than Double Click. By looking past just the site-level traffic metric to the engagement metrics by source, we were able to see how uniquely suited our ads are for helping Central Market expand its online market share. This information helps our team advise Central Market on the best way to maximize their spend on future ad campaigns.