Resources
Online advertising: measuring what matters
A campaign is judged on the cost of acquiring a customer, not on impressions. Instrument first, spend second: that order decides the profitability of any advertising budget, whatever its size.
Instrument before spending
A measured campaign starts by defining the action that counts: a form submitted, a call triggered, an order placed. That action is instrumented on the site, tested and verified before any money is spent. Acquisition cost can then be computed from day three, and the decision to scale or stop rests on a figure rather than an impression. Without that step, a campaign produces impressions nobody can attribute.
- A conversion action defined and instrumented before launch
- A capped daily budget, adjusted on measured results
- An audience described by needs, never by demographics alone
- Two creatives compared on the same audience, to isolate the message effect
- A tracked acquisition cost, compared with a customer's value
What each figure tells you
Cost per click
It measures competition on your audience. It guides targeting, not the decision to scale.
Conversion rate
It judges the landing page far more than the ad. A gap is fixed there faster than in the campaign.
Acquisition cost
The only decision figure: set against a customer's value, it says scale or revise.
Attribution
It shares credit between touchpoints. The chosen model changes the reading: state it upfront.
Two formats to acquire this skill
A full programme and a short format. The columns state the depth of each: the first covers attribution and comparative testing, the second takes you to a first measured campaign.
| Programme | Hours per week | Duration | Taught hours | Credits |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Digital Marketing | 20 h | 2 years | 1200 h | 120 |
| Digital Marketing Essentials | 8 h | 2 months | 40 h | 4 |
Questions about campaigns
What budget should I start with?
The one that produces enough conversions to decide: a campaign is judged on a number of actions, not on an amount. The catalogue's short format covers exactly how to set a daily budget and read the first results.
How do I know when to stop a campaign?
When acquisition cost durably exceeds a customer's value, the trade-off makes itself. That is why that value is calculated before launch: it constitutes the decision threshold.
Does each campaign need its own landing page?
As soon as the ad's message is precise, the landing page gains from being equally so: continuity between the two accounts for most of the conversion rate. One page per intent is enough, and it then serves organic search too.
Explore next
- Community managementEditorial line, realistic calendar, phone-shot content production, moderation, handling sensitive situations and a measured monthly report.
- Customer journeySegmentation, targeting, positioning and value proposition: building an accurate message and placing it at the right moments in the purchase journey.
- AI and decisionsFraming a use case, estimating an AI project's full cost, defining real-usage indicators and setting an internal policy: the decision-maker's skills.
- Preparing dataSources, formats, missing values, duplicates, reference data and traceability: the data preparation method that makes an analysis defensible.
- DashboardsThe starting question, chart choice, visual hierarchy, thresholds and alerts, distribution: building a dashboard that triggers decisions.
- Misleading analysisSelection effects, chosen denominators, correlation versus causation, truncated axes: the four checks to run before accepting a figure.