For us in advertising who are used to doing digital plans, two of the most common and overused metrics we look at are impressions and clicks. Many advertisers, to this day, for better or for worse, use these two metrics as key indicators of performance by looking at the cost per thousand impressions (CPM) and cost per click (CPC) as ways to measure the cost efficiency of a particular campaign.
What Other Advertisers Look For
More sophisticated advertisers had graduated beyond these two metrics a while back and started to look for instead for quality over quantity. How exactly does one measure quality you ask? In the digital space, one thing we can look at is the time spent on site after the initial click through. The reason is fairly simple, the more time an individual spends on a particular site is assumed to be indicative of the individuals interest level and as such labeled as a higher quality impression and click.