Aim higher, not wider: It’s time to call out reach as a KPI
Opinion
Black-box platforms offer nothing but short-term noise, no learning, no conversations, no loyalty, and no meaningful audience understanding. A renewed focus on cost per acquisition is required, says DAC UK’s managing partner.
Marketing performance has always been under close scrutiny. What’s changed is the pressure marketers are under. Budgets are tighter, markets are noisier, but expectations have not diminished.
A recent DAC and Forrester report found that 67% of marketers are now being asked to justify their marketing investments more frequently. When that pressure kicks in, many fall back on familiar metrics.
Reach is a vanity metric; it creates the appearance of effectiveness without much scrutiny, so it’s probably not surprising that it was the most widely tracked performance metric among CMOs in the UK last year.
“We reached a million people” is neat, boardroom-friendly, and fits on a slide.
However, in a landscape supposedly defined by omnichannel sophistication and hyper-personalisation, it’s a cop-out.
The road to reach
So, who’s to blame for this sorry state of affairs? We didn’t get here overnight, and it certainly wasn’t by chance.
The big generalist agencies are partly at fault; changing media consumption habits have forced them to reposition as “digital-first”, and reach has historically been enough for the types of global brands that fit their ICP.
However, it’s the platforms that have been pushing reach hardest because it suits their needs. Google and Meta’s black-box algorithms are optimised to distribute messages as widely as possible, and they compete effectively on price.
You get what you pay for, though. While scaling at the best price might feel good, you won’t know in any great detail who has seen your campaign or be able to reach them again. Moreover, the platforms keep the engagement insights to strengthen their targeting models.
Without access to contact details, an understanding of who responded, why they engaged, or what factors influenced their decision, each campaign remains a one-off.
The black-box platforms offer nothing but short-term noise, no learning, no conversations, no loyalty, and no meaningful audience understanding. Bargain.
Short-term wins, long-term blind spots
What is perhaps even more reductive is relying on volume, which prevents you from thinking strategically
Sure, they tell you something, but not generally anything that you can use to understand customer behaviours at a meaningful level. This means marketers miss opportunities to spot patterns that will underpin business strategies and identify their most lucrative customers, now and in the future.
CPAs may be more expensive upfront, and the numbers will be lower, so they look less effective, but they reveal intent and allow you to qualify, not just quantify, a campaign’s effectiveness.
Across categories, The Big Table Group, David Lloyd, and Medivet offer very different services but share a common challenge.
Each operates hundreds of sites across the UK, and footfall varies significantly by location. A strategy that foregrounds reach can’t explain why some outperform others, let alone offer any insights that inform remedial action.
CPAs can help us understand what specific factors contribute to a particular site’s success, or not.
For instance, analysing what channels, offers or services – whether that’s a menu, class or treatment – are actually driving demand allows you to experiment, iterate and arrive at more educated guesses on how and where your media investment will make the biggest impact.
Crucially, using metrics to understand who your customers are and what their needs are across different areas enables better business decisions.
What’s the agency’s role?
Business consultancy is where the best agencies earn their keep.
Our job shouldn’t be to default to the metrics that are easiest to justify in the short term. It should be to think strategically about what business challenges the data can be used to solve, to work out what data insights would address them, and how to ensure we get the right data to reveal those insights – what we call the brief behind the brief.
That isn’t to say that visibility and reach no longer have a place in modern marketing. After all, who in the UK had heard of Hisense before it started sponsoring the FIFA World Cup in 2018? Eight years on, the brand is just as well-known as Samsung or Sony, impressive given how tough the consumer electronics category is to break into.
However, reach and competitive pricing alone didn’t make Hisense the high street brand it has since become.
The brand awareness campaign was supported by paid and organic search, PR, a reviews strategy, online content, and community engagement. This wouldn’t have been cheap, but then proper omnichannel marketing strategies never are – but it’s a premium worth paying.
There are no shortcuts in marketing, or at least not when it comes to marketing done well.
A focus on reach might give you the numbers boost you need for the next quarterly report, but it won’t turn the dial or stop you from panicking when the next one is due.
Mike Fantis is VP and managing partner, DAC UK