How To Measure Success With Brewery Advertising

Ultimately the most important metric related to your advertising strategy is revenue. Any marketer that doesn’t admit that is delusional. It’s the dollars that truly count at the end of the day. 

In order for your advertising strategy to drive more revenue, it needs to deliver the right message to more of the right people, frequently enough for them to remember it. Therefore, you should care about other advertising metrics too. 

In this post, we’re going to discuss some of those advertising metrics and how they lead to more revenue for your brewery. 

TLDR versions on our podcast and on YouTube. 

KEY PERFORMANCE INDICATORS (KPI)

Many business owners overlook advertising KPIs because they are hyper-focused on the bottom line. It’s understandable considering the pressures of running a business and you’re not wrong for caring about seeing actual results. The paradox is that only focusing on the bottom line doesn’t actually improve the bottom line that much - or can make it worse.  

KPIs allow us to measure the effectiveness of up-channel activities and make decisionsbased on what is or is not working there. Optimizing your advertising strategy based on specific KPIs will improve the quality of your campaigns and the engagement they drive to your digital assets - and THAT leads to revenue. 

REACH

This is the number of unique individuals that your ads are shown to. Depending on the ad platform, reach can refer to unique individual devices too (i.e.. the same person that saw your ad on Facebook and again on Instagram would count as 2 individuals reached). 

Either way, reach is super important. This metric will tell you how many people you are actually showing your ads to. More people = more opportunity for sales

Caveat: Simply maximizing reach is not necessarily good. The objective should be to get as much reach as you can within your target audience. 

FREQUENCY

If reach is the number of unique individuals/devices you got in front of, frequency is how many times you got in front of them. Showing your ads too many times is not good - nobody likes a pest. However, under-advertising can be worse. 

If you aren’t showing your ads enough then people won’t take action or they’ll simply not remember you. Imagine spending hundreds of dollars to run ads and having nobody remember them… ouch. 

How much frequency is good? It’s hard to give a cover-all answer because every situation is a little different, but we generally aim for a frequency of about three when we’re launching new campaigns. 

CLICK THROUGH RATE (CTR) / ENGAGEMENT RATE

If all you did was run campaigns that got high reach and good frequency then you might be on the right track. You could also be going in the totally wrong direction. This is why CTR and Engagement Rate are essential KPIs. 

These metrics measure how often your ads are interacted with compared to how many times they were shown. Low CTR usually indicates that your messaging and/or collateral are not resonating with your audience - it can also indicate that your audience isn’t that great either. On the flip side, high CTR usually indicates that your messaging and target are working well. 

Determining what a good CTR looks like takes time. It’s less about hitting an ideal number and more about comparing differences over time.

CONNECTING THE DOTS

Ultimately, what is going to help your brewery increase sales is getting more of the right people into your taproom, recognizing your tap handles at other bars, or picking your cans off the shelf.

Therefore, the mission of your advertising campaigns is to show your messaging to more of the right people and motivate them to take action. Let’s review…

Reach: tells you how many unique individuals within your target audience are seeing your message

Frequency: tells you how often your message is being served to each audience member

Click-Through Rate / Engagement Rate: tells you how good your messaging is

If you reach more of the right people, frequently enough, and serve the right message then you’re going to earn more sales. The rest is up to what’s in the glass.