Performance metrics don’t tell the whole story—but your audience can
Performance metrics have always been revered as the North Star of a campaign’s effectiveness.
These could vary from collected data on impressions, click-through rates (CTR), conversions, and ROAS (Return on Ad Spend), which are plastered across dashboards, used in quarterly reviews, and weaponized in stakeholder meetings.
At the same time, budgets are tightening, and expectations are ballooning. Performance marketing leaders are left needing to defend large portions of their budgets—sometimes millions of dollars in spending—to gain a few seconds of consumer attention.
Understandably, it’s easy to see why teams defer to these “hard” metrics as a safety net.
But here's the problem: these numbers are often post-mortem. When reported in isolation, over-reliance on that form of data, and only that, could put performance marketers at risk of missing the bigger picture entirely when it comes to reporting back on a campaign’s true impact.
What are the disadvantages of performance metrics?
It’s true that performance metrics show outcomes, such as how many people clicked, converted, or dropped off. But they don’t reveal the story behind those actions.
Here’s what you might have trouble figuring out later on, even if your post-campaign analysis is showing you:
- Low click-through rates: Can your internal team make the decision on what exactly was responsible for low CTRs? Who decides if the root cause of this is attributable to ambiguity, jargon, or simply a message that failed to resonate with audiences?
- High bounce rates: Once you understand that people are leaving your page quickly, do you understand why? Was it frustrating UX, an off-putting message, or simply a case of misaligned expectations?
- High drop-off rates: Similarly, the root cause of this could be anything from encountering a broken link or an unexpected paywall.
In a 2024 Gartner study, 54% of CMOs say they prioritize performance marketing, compared to just 22% who prioritize brand marketing. Yet, research shows that the highest-performing marketing organizations are those investing proportionally more in brand awareness.
The pressure for immediate, quantifiable results often overshadows the long-term, foundational benefits of building a strong brand—which might indirectly put advertising and marketing functions at the risk of constantly paying to get new customers, but never truly connecting with them.
So, how do you bridge the gap between the data that everyone expects from you and the full insights you actually need to succeed?
GUIDE
Maximize marketing ROI—before you waste another dollar
Why is audience insight the missing piece?
Audience insights offer a profound understanding of your target customers, moving beyond mere statistics to uncover their emotions, motivations, behaviors, and preferences—essentially explaining why they act as they do.
Rather than being opposing forces, performance metrics and audience insights are powerful allies. Tools that provide real-time audience feedback, like UserTesting, deliver a crucial qualitative depth that quantitative metrics simply cannot.
This means you don't just observe what actions people took; you gain invaluable insight into their feelings, moments of hesitation, and what genuinely pleased or alienated them.
Audience insights are able to do the following for your campaign efforts:
- Reveal emotional resonance: Was your message empowering or patronizing? Did your visuals inspire or confuse?
- Surface unintended friction: A UX issue, confusing phrasing, or culturally insensitive visuals can derail engagement—including real, human insights can catch them early before you end up wasting ad spend or jeopardizing your brand’s reputation.
- Predict future trends and behaviors: By understanding the evolving attitudes and preferences of your audience, you can anticipate if attention is shifting elsewhere and how to respond to that.
How do you translate audience insights into smarter campaigns?
How do you operationalize this? How do you take audience feedback and embed it into your campaign lifecycle without slowing everything down?
Every campaign is different, but for planning purposes, here's an average cycle broken down by weeks and a starting point to help teams visualize how and where audience insight can add value.
Week 1-2: Pre-launch validation
This is where teams build foundational confidence. Messaging, visuals, tone, and even basic narrative arcs should be tested with your target audience.
Don’t just ask what they think, but observe how they respond. Are they confused? Bored? Delighted?
Skipping this stage often leads to costly rework once the campaign is already launched. It’s far more cost-effective to make changes before media spend kicks in than to course-correct mid-flight (or worse, post-campaign).
Week 3-4: Iteration and refinement
With validation insights in hand, creative teams refine copy, assets, and campaign structure. If you uncover something surprising—say, early reactions show confusion around the CTA—you can pivot quickly. That agility preserves spend and protects brand equity.
Real-time testing can help de-risk creative collateral within 24–48 hours. At the same time, integrating this form of “insight reviews” into creative checkpoints ensures that your creative teams aren’t building in isolation and consistently improving the way they ideate, design, and measure the impact of work.
Week 5-6: Internal alignment
When you're in the final stages of a campaign and need approval from teams like creative, media, brand, and leadership, audience insights can be incredibly powerful.
This is where performance marketing leaders can add a vital layer of real-time feedback. They can share short video clips, direct quotes, and other authentic reactions from actual people responding to the campaign work.
This kind of direct human insight can make a big difference in getting everyone's buy-in.
You're not just arguing that the CTA is clear; you're showing a dozen audience members who understood it instantly, which also helps cut through internal bias or preference.
Our work with UserTesting gives a voice to the consumer so that people can hear directly from them what they are saying about the ad or the product or service. Oftentimes in meetings, people cite video clips from a year or two earlier where they still remember what people said.
Moving towards a human-first advertising future
We’re not advocating for the abandonment of performance metrics. They’re essential, just not infallible, and need to be supplemented with real-time data from the people who are actually going to be experiencing your campaign.
Ultimately, truly impactful marketing and advertising is about understanding the human element: the emotions, motivations, and experiences that drive those numbers.
Blending existing performance metrics with rich, nuanced stories from audience insights is a powerful combination that allows your entire organization to rally around what really happened, how to improve, and build the kind of campaigns that deliver long-lasting impact.
Key takeaways
- Numbers alone aren't enough. Performance metrics tell you what happened, but need to be supported with a conclusion that is not affected by internal bias.
- Audience insights fill the gaps. They show you how people truly feel, where they get stuck, and why they do what they do.
- Don't ignore brand building. While quick wins matter, the best companies invest more in their brand for long-term success.
- Use human feedback early and often. Get real reactions from customers throughout your campaign planning, even when getting final approvals from multiple stakeholders.
- Combine data with human insights. The strongest campaigns mix numbers with audience understanding to truly connect and get better results.
FAQs
Q: How do audience insights improve ROI?
A: They allow performance marketing leads (advertisers, marketers, etc.) to pre-test and refine campaigns based on real reactions—ensuring creative connects and converts before budgets are committed.
Q: What forms of campaign objectives can audience insights help with?
A: This can range from validating campaign messaging, testing cross-channel creative, or uncovering true audience sentiment only previously understandable from quantitative, historical data.
Q: Is this scalable for enterprise teams?
A: Yes. With platforms like UserTesting, rapid feedback loops are designed for speed, scale, and strategic impact.
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