The 15 minutes of planning that saves you three months of confusion.
Here's the pattern that plays out with most advertising partners. A brand signs up, gets excited, launches a campaign, and then three weeks later asks: "So... is this working?"
And your partner says: "Working toward what?"
That's the problem. You were never asked to define what "working" meant before you started spending. Now you're staring at a dashboard full of numbers with no idea which ones matter for your situation. CPMs look good but why aren't there more sales? Or sales are solid but why such a low click-through rate?
Most wasted dollars in advertising trace back to one failure: launching without knowing what success looks like. At Armanet, we work with you to define success, train you on the metrics, and make sure we are aligned before you spend anything.
Step One: What Are You Actually Trying to Do?
This sounds obvious but often isn't. I have sat on calls with experienced marketing directors who cannot clearly articulate what they want their campaign to accomplish. Not because they're bad at their jobs, but because many of these metrics weren't reliably available before.
In our space, virtually every campaign falls into one of three buckets:
Bucket 1: Brand Awareness. You want people to know you exist, or to know that a new product exists. You're not primarily trying to drive immediate sales. You're trying to occupy mental real estate so that when someone is ready to buy, your brand is the one they think of first.
This is the right goal if you're launching a new product line, entering a new category, or you're a brand that most of the firearms community simply hasn't heard of yet. It's also the right goal if you're a well-known brand that's introducing something new. SilencerCo launching a new suppressor, Leupold dropping a new optic line, and a new holster company entering the market. All awareness plays first.
Bucket 2: Performance / Direct Response. You want sales. Products bought from your site or a retailer's site, full-on completed purchases. You want to measure dollars in versus dollars out and see a clear return.
This is the right goal if you have an established product, an audience that already knows your brand (at least somewhat), and a website or retail presence that can actually close the sale. Most of our mid-to-large advertisers end up here once they've built baseline awareness.
Bucket 3: Retargeting / Re-engagement. You want to bring back people who already showed interest. They visited your site, browsed a product page, maybe even added something to a cart and bounced. You want to nudge them across the finish line.
This is a supporting play, not a standalone strategy. You need top-and-middle-of-funnel activity (awareness or performance campaigns) to generate the audience that retargeting works against. Running retargeting without prospecting doesn't work.
Pick one primary bucket. Not two. Not "a little of both." One. You can layer in secondary objectives later, but your primary goal determines everything that follows: which KPIs you track, what benchmarks you hold yourself to, and how you judge success.
Step Two: Match Your KPIs to Your Goal
This is where most advertisers go sideways. They pick awareness as their goal and then judge the campaign by ROAS. Or they pick performance as their goal and then panic about CPMs. You have to measure the right thing.
Here's the mapping:
If your goal is Brand Awareness, your primary KPIs are:
Reach. How many unique people saw your ad. This is the core metric. The whole point is getting in front of new eyeballs.
Frequency. How many times each person saw it. You need enough repetition for the message to register (3 to 7 is the sweet spot for most awareness campaigns in our space), but not so much that you're burning money hitting the same people twelve times.
Viewability. Did the ad actually have a chance to be seen? If you're paying for impressions and half of them aren't viewable, you're paying for wasted impressions.
Video completion rate (if running video or CTV). What percentage of people watched your full spot? This tells you whether and how much your creative is holding attention. Watch completion rates are to video what CTR is to display.
What you should NOT obsess over in an awareness campaign: CTR and ROAS. Clicks are nice but not the point. Conversions will happen as a downstream effect. Awareness plants seeds. Harvesting will come later.
If your goal is Performance / Direct Response, your primary KPIs are:
ROAS. Revenue generated divided by ad spend. This tells you if the campaign is making money.
CPA (Cost Per Acquisition). How much you paid for each conversion. This needs to be well below your margin on the product for the math to work.
CTR. Click-through rate matters here because you need people to take action. Low CTR on a performance campaign means something is off with your creative or targeting.
What you should NOT obsess over in a performance campaign: Raw impressions and reach. You're not trying to show the ad to everyone. You're trying to show it to the right people and get them to buy.
If your goal is Retargeting, your primary KPIs are:
CVR. This should be significantly higher than your prospecting campaigns because you're targeting warm audiences.
CPA. Should be lower than prospecting for the same reason.
Frequency (but capped). You want to stay in front of these people almost to an annoying level. Cap frequency at 7–9 for retargeting.
ROAS. Should be strong here. If your retargeting ROAS is weak, the issue is probably your landing page or checkout experience, not the ad.
Step Three: Set Realistic Benchmarks
This is the part where I'm going to be more specific than most ad platforms are willing to be, because I think our advertisers deserve real numbers instead of hand-waving.
These benchmarks are based on what we see across our network. Your individual results will vary based on your product, your price point, your creative, and your landing page experience. But these are the ranges you should be measuring against.
Display Ads:
CTR: 0.15% to 0.35%. If you're consistently below 0.10%, your creative or targeting needs work. If you're above 0.40%, you're doing something very right and the creatives hitting that CTR should inform your creative production strategy going forward.
CPM: $4–6. This is around the average range for display CPMs across the network. If you're doing a lot of custom targeting or geo-targeting, these CPMs will likely be higher, because you're bidding more to be in front of specific users you care about.
Video Ads:
Video completion rate: 60% to 80% for in-stream, 10%–30% for out-stream.
CTR: Higher than display, typically 0.20% to 0.40%. Video ads are more engaging than display ads and will garner more clicks. We've seen video ads with CTRs as high as 1%!
Connected TV (CTV):
CPM: $20–40. CTV is unskippable, shows on big screens, and competes with mainstream advertisers. CPMs are accordingly higher.
Completion rate: 85%+. People generally watch CTV ads because they can't skip them, so high completion is expected.
Measuring CTV by clicks or direct conversions is a mistake. CTV is a brand awareness and consideration play. The right way to measure it is by looking at lift in your other channels — did search traffic increase? Did your display retargeting pool grow? Did site visits spike after the CTV flights started running?
Dynamic Product Ads (DPA):
CTR: 0.25% to 0.50%+. Higher than standard display because you're showing people specific products relevant to their browsing behavior.
ROAS: Often as much as 2x display and video because these are highly targeted, product-specific ads served to people with demonstrated purchase intent.
CPM: Same as display — these are functionally display ads.
On time horizons:
Benchmarks mean nothing if you're reading them too early.
I covered this in detail in the budget post, but it bears repeating: don't evaluate a campaign's true performance until you have at least 60 to 90 days of data. Month one is calibration. Month two is optimization. Month three is your real read.
This is especially true for high-ticket products. The average time-to-conversion on a $900 optic or a $1,200 suppressor can be 2–4 weeks. If you're checking ROAS on day seven, you're looking at a fraction of the conversions that campaign is going to generate.
The Goal-Setting Conversation You Should Have Before Launch
Before your first campaign goes live, you and your AM should be aligned on five things:
- Primary objective. Awareness or performance.
- KPIs you're tracking. Based on the mapping above. Write down the two or three metrics that matter for your goal. Ignore the rest until you have a reason not to.
- Benchmarks you're measuring against. Use the ranges above as starting points. Your AM can refine them based on your specific category, price point, and competitive landscape.
- Timeline for evaluation. 90 days recommended. Agree on a specific date when you'll sit down, look at the data, and make decisions reviewing the whole campaign holistically.
- What "scale" looks like. If the campaign hits benchmarks, what's the plan? Increase budget by 50%? Add a new channel? Launch a new product campaign? Knowing the next step before you start keeps momentum from stalling when things are actually working.
The brands that get the most out of Armanet aren't the ones with the biggest budgets. They're the ones who decided what success looked like before they spent a dollar.
Pick your goal. Pick your KPIs. Set your benchmarks. Agree on a timeline. Then launch.
Everything else is just optimization, and optimization is the easy part when you know what you're optimizing toward.