3 Easy Steps to Measure New Channel Performance
Should I experiment with a new marketing channel? How do I know it works? Both questions are legitimate. Digital marketers like me or maybe also like you wonder about answering them.
Mar 28, 2025
Formulas
3 min
Should I experiment with a new marketing channel? How do I know it works? Both questions are legitimate. Digital marketers like me or maybe also like you wonder about answering them.
Measuring the performance of such channels isn’t hard. Let’s take a look at three simple steps that help you measure the success of your newly acquired channels.
Take a Look at General Metrics
The very first step to measure how well the new channel does is to take a look at the metrics at hand. We are interested in metrics like:
Traffic
Conversion rate
Click through rate
Open rate
Impressions or Reach
Views
Followers
Of course feel free to choose your desired metrics.
To make sense of the metrics we can compare them to the industry benchmarks. That way, we get to know a little bit more about how we are doing in comparison to others.
Measure the Incremental Lift
The next step is to measure the incremental lift of the new channel. In other words, what the channel brought that wasn’t there before. A very simple equation that quantifies the incremental lift of adding a channel is:
This shows how much better the efforts became after introducing the channel to all marketing operations. The formula is very flexible in its variability. You can choose your focus, which means you can measure performance in terms of:
Revenue
Conversions (leads, sign-ups, purchases)
Engagement (clicks, CTR, impressions)
ROI or ROAS (Return on Ad Spend)
Let’s follow a simple example to calculate the incremental lift. Last week we started with posting on LinkedIn, now we want to see how much the channel improves our traffic to the website. The overall traffic this week peaked at 177 users, from which LinkedIn brought in 31 users. That is a 21% improvement in contrast with not posting on LinkedIn at all.
The incremental lift of the LinkedIn is 21,2%.
Measure the Channel Contribution
The last step of evaluating the performance of a newly acquired channel is measuring its contribution to the overall performance. Again we can measure the performance in different terms such as revenue, conversions, engagement, or ROI. For measuring the channel contribution we can use this handy formula:
Now let’s continue with our example with LinkedIn posting and utilize the formula. The LinkedIn visitors generated 4 form submit conversions out of 23 in total last week. This means that LinkedIn is participating in 17% of the overall number of conversions.
The LinkedIn contribution to the marketing performance is 17%.
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Summary
How to measure the performance of the new channel? Measuring how well the new channel performs doesn’t have to be hard. To measure its performance, do a three-step evaluation: start by analyzing the metrics at hand, follow up by calculating the incremental lift of the new channel, and finish by calculating the channel's overall contribution to all marketing performance.
