So far, you've learned about some ways to raise awareness and engage with potential customers. You know that selecting the right channels to reach a target audience is one of the most important things businesses can do to market products online. But we haven't gotten to the most important part: how do you know if the tactics you've chosen are working? Are there ways to improve on what you're already doing or do you need to start again with a whole new plan? To answer all of these questions is measurement. The fact is, no matter how much research you do or how carefully you plan a marketing strategy, none of it matters unless you can measure your success. Measuring outcomes at each stage of the funnel allows you to find out what you're doing right, what you're doing wrong, and where you can improve. In this video, we'll discuss some of the metrics companies use to measure success at the top of the funnel. A metric is a quantifiable measurement used to track and assess progress toward an objective. Marketing metrics can gauge different aspects of campaign performance and effectiveness, which can help businesses make improvements for the future. For example, to measure awareness of their ads, marketers use tools to track things like impressions, reach, and frequency. Impressions are the total number of times an ad appears on people's screens. That number includes users who encountered the ad more than once. If an ad is encountered 200 times by 100 people, the number of impressions is 200, since it's been shown 200 times. In contrast, reach is the total number of unique individuals who encounter an ad across their different devices. No matter how many times a person gets that ad, they're only counted once. The reach of an ad that's encountered 200 times by 100 people would be 100. Frequency refers to how many times each individual encounters the ad in a given timeframe. So if each of those 100 people gets the ad twice in a week, their frequency would be two. These are just a few of the metrics you can use to gauge awareness. You'll learn more about tracking and analyzing awareness measurements later on in the program. The goal of the awareness stage is usually to get ads in front of the right people at the right times. By analyzing impressions, reach, and frequency, marketers can find out how big of an impact their ads are having. If the numbers are below the company's goal for awareness, they may decide to re-evaluate their ad strategy. But businesses can also have more specific awareness goals like getting a certain amount of visitors to a page on a website. Exactly what you choose to measure depends on what you're trying to achieve. That's why it's important to set goals for each stage of the funnel. At the consideration stage, there are different ways to measure success, but they all come down to one idea: Engagement. How much, how often, and for how long are potential customers engaging with your content. Analytics tools can track things like how often customers search for your business online, the number of first-time visitors to a site, the number of pages per visitor, and how long visitors spend on a page. Signing up for emails or newsletters is another good measurement of engagement, and getting customer contact information will make it easier to remind them you exist, and demonstrate your value later on. It may seem like more engagement is better, but that isn't always the case. If the goal is for customers to find what they need quickly but customers spend a long time completing tasks, it may mean you need to re-evaluate the layout of your website. Measuring website interactions can give you a lot of insights. So knowing which numbers are important and what they mean for your goals is crucial. Even with clear goals and accurate information, measuring awareness and engagement is often more challenging than measuring bottom-of-the-funnel concerns, like sales. Later in the program, you'll learn how to interpret this kind of information and how businesses use it to improve their tactics for moving leads from consideration to conversion. Let's review. Measuring awareness and engagement is the most important things brands can do to ensure success at the top of the funnel. Marketing teams use analytics tools to measure awareness through numbers of impressions, reach, and frequency. Consideration can be measured through website engagement, including page visits, detailed views, and email sign-ups. Knowing what to measure in order to reach our goals is an important part of marketing success. Coming up, you'll learn more about the funnel and what to do at the conversion and loyalty stages.