How to Evaluate a Media Buying Agency by KPI: Audit Framework by Level

To understand how to evaluate a media buying agency by KPIs, check inventory quality, placement confirmation, reach, cost per contact, target actions, and business results.

How to evaluate a media buying agency by KPIs?

Agency performance review starts with inventory verification. The first level is confirming that platforms and formats match the technical brief, creatives went live on schedule, and placements appeared in the agreed locations. Without this step, it's impossible to judge traffic quality: if a banner displayed on different pages or at different times, reach and audience will not match what was planned.

The second level is reach and frequency. Here you check how many unique users saw the ad and how many times. High frequency with low reach means the budget went to repeated impressions to the same narrow group rather than attracting new audiences.

The third level is cost per contact. CPM and CPV show how much each thousand impressions or video view cost. These metrics allow you to compare platform efficiency, but on their own they don't reveal audience quality or engagement.

The fourth level is target actions. Yandex Metrica tracks goal completions: site visits, specific page views, form submissions, adding items to cart. Conversion is calculated as the ratio of goal visits to total visits. For display advertising, Metrica tracks conversion of those who saw the banner or video, providing a direct link between impression and action.

The fifth level is business results. Here you count sales, leads, ROMI (return on marketing investment), and advertising cost ratio. The ARIR Casebook 2025 showed that in performance campaigns, brands achieved revenue growth of 8.5 percentage points, attracted hundreds of new customers to offline stores, and measured each channel's contribution to final conversion. Without this final level, it's impossible to understand whether the investment paid off.

Why CPM alone doesn't prove effectiveness

CPM reflects only the cost of showing to a thousand users, but doesn't account for who those users are or what they did after contact with the ad. An agency might offer a platform with CPM half the market rate, but if the audience turns out to be non-targeted or bots inflate impressions, none of the subsequent metric levels will work. In the ARIR Casebook, experts from T2, T‑Bank, WhoIsBlogger, VseInstrumenty.ru, Next Level agency, and "Sedmoe Kasanie" evaluated projects for systematic approach and honest demonstration of results across the entire chain—from concept and creator selection to specific business metrics.

In 2025, transparency and measurability requirements have intensified: the market has become more demanding, and familiar combinations and platforms need to be reassembled

Low CPM can hide viewability issues: the banner loads at the bottom of the page, but the user didn't scroll down, and technically the impression is counted. Or placement runs in the lower traffic segment, where people don't linger and don't take target actions. That's why CPM should be cross-checked with view-through rate (percentage of video completions), click-through rate, and the share of target audience in total reach.

How to conduct a media buying audit: marketer's checklist

Verification starts with requesting placement proof: screenshots, post links, reports from ad accounts. The agency must confirm that creatives went live on declared platforms on specified dates in agreed formats. Next, request reach and frequency reports from analytics systems—Yandex Metrica, VK Ads, myTarget, or platform internal dashboards. This data shows how many unique users saw the ad and how many times each.

The next step is calculating CPM, CPV, or CPC for each platform and comparing with market benchmarks. If cost per contact is noticeably higher or lower than average, you need to understand why: perhaps the agency chose premium inventory with high engagement or bought remnant traffic. After that, analyze target metrics in Yandex Metrica: goal visits, conversion, achievements per visitor. Metrica for display advertising allows tracking what share of those who saw the banner completed a target action on the site.

The final audit block is linking to business results. Here you count leads, sales, average check, lifetime value of customers from the campaign, and ROMI. If the brand has end-to-end analytics set up, you can see the complete user journey from impression to purchase and evaluate media buying's contribution to the overall marketing mix. The ARIR Casebook 2025 contains projects where brands Dreame, T2, T‑Bank, Polaris, Yandex, SALO, Blacklight, Fistashki, Perfluence achieved reach of 20 million people and hundreds of new clients through transparent analytics at all levels.

What ETC checks during campaign audit

ETC agency starts the audit by reviewing the media plan: platform alignment with target audience profile, accuracy of reach and budget forecasts. Then source data is requested from advertising systems and web analytics to eliminate discrepancies between declared and actual metrics. Traffic quality is verified: bot share, geography of impressions, devices, time of day. If reports show anomalies—for example, a sharp spike in impressions at night or traffic concentration from one region in a federal campaign—that's reason to revise settings or change the platform.

Next, ETC cross-references media metrics with goals in Yandex Metrica. A goal can be defined as viewing a specific page, clicking a button, submitting a form, or a cart event. Metrica records goal achievement, goal visitor, and goal visit, based on which conversion is calculated. For each platform and format, a funnel is built: impression → visit → target action → purchase. This reveals at which stage the audience is lost and where creative, landing page, or targeting settings need adjustment.

The final report contains optimization recommendations: which platforms delivered the best ROMI and should be scaled, which formats didn't meet expectations, how to reallocate budget between channels. If the campaign included blogger advertising, ETC analyzes integration quality, compliance with ad labeling under Law 38-FZ, reach and engagement of each creator's audience, site visits, and conversions from posts and stories.

Frequently asked questions

What are the main KPIs for evaluating a media buying agency?

The main KPIs are reach, CPM or CPV, conversion from goal visits, and ROMI. Reach shows how many unique users the campaign reached, cost per contact shows budget efficiency, conversion shows the share who completed a target action, ROMI shows return on investment in rubles. All these metrics should be evaluated together to see the complete picture.

How to verify that the agency actually placed the ads?

Request placement proof: screenshots with date and time, direct links to posts or pages, exports from ad accounts. For video ads and banners, ask for reports from monitoring systems that record the fact of impression. If the agency cannot provide confirmation, that's cause for concern.

Why is conversion from ads low with good reach?

Low conversion with high reach indicates problems with targeting, creative, or landing page. Perhaps the ad was shown to a broad but non-targeted audience, or the creative didn't convince users to visit the site. Another reason is mismatch between the banner promise and page content: the user arrived, didn't find what was expected, and left.