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How to measure Marketing efficiency
"Is my Marketing working?!" Probably so let me help you defend it from those vultures in Finance.
👋 Hey, it’s Sundar! Welcome to a 🔐 paid 🔐 article of experiMENTAL: a weekly newsletter on B2C Marketing & data science how-to guides, frameworks, and stories from 15 years including early Uber.
How to measure Marketing efficiency
One of the biggest line items for any company is marketing and so naturally an equally big question is “How do I know if my Marketing is working?” Unfortunately, the answer is not a simple one to answer because of how complex Marketing actually is.
Here’s what Marketing actually looks like:

The complexity comes from the fact that here are 4 layers of Marketing efficiency that you have to unpack. In today’s article, we’ll go deeper on how to measure the efficiency of all of these layers and the hierarchy between them.
Campaign
A campaign is the building block of any Marketing function. It represents a singular entity in a channel with an objective. Example. A Facebook campaign that drives conversions in New York City. The question we need to answer is “Is this individual campaign performing?”
Surprisingly, it’s the one layer where I believe it’s okay to look at platform metrics. In platform metrics are full of biases / inaccuracies, BUT they do show trends and patterns you can use to your advantage. Depending on the platform, there are a host of metrics you can use to compare:
CPM / CPC
CTR
CVR (conversion rate)
All of these platform metrics tell you how your campaign is doing but the beauty is that they are ALL beholden to the same attribution and tracking challenges you’d normally have because they’re in the same channel. Attribution and tracking issues on Meta are different than Google, but within Meta, it’s all the same. This makes campaign optimization less data science related and more of an optimization based on comparing campaigns.
Example
You have 2 Meta campaigns running. One in the US and one in another market. You can then compare everything from CPM, CTR, ROAS / CAC etc to understand which campaign is performing better. Now, “better” is a bit subjective but you can try to understand structural differences. Why is CTR lower? Is the ad different or the messaging ? Are keywords different? Is the intent different?
Channel
Channel efficiency looks at how an entire marketing channel performs when you aggregate all campaigns within it for a specific objective. It’s important that you narrow it down to an objective as each channel has its own goal but you can also run multiple goals within a channel.
This is where you move beyond individual campaign metrics to understand the overall effectiveness of the channel itself for that objective. Here, you’ll take the same approach to looking at campaign metrics but aggregate them up at a higher level. In addition, we’ll also need to introduce higher level metrics that are better at assessing performance.
I’d take a look at metrics like:

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