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With the rise of social media, companies like Facebook have charged that the CTR is a meaningless metric for branding campaigns. Opponents of CTR as a default metric argue that you can see an ad, not click on it and still be influenced by it. After all, that's the way most advertising has worked until now. You don't interact with a billboard, but it might introduce you to a new brand or product which you eventually might try.

KPIs vary depending on what stage of the purchase funnel your target customer is at. In the beginning, you may just want to raise awareness, in which case you'd rely on surveys to gauge success. Further along, you might be looking for interaction. Did the customer watch your video? Did she interact with your ad in some way?

Many consider these to be vanity metrics: measures which are easy to understand but on their own explain little about the actionable effect.  They are easily manipulated, and do not necessarily correlate to the numbers that really matter. More actionable metrics are argued to be active users, engagement, the cost of getting new customers, and ultimately revenues and profits

Talking about Twitter specifically, Adi Avnit de-emphasizes the importance of followers due to the fact some users follow back others simply because of etiquette. His ‘million follower fallacy’ entails that this etiquette is leveraged by some users to elevate their follower count. The theory is not without evidence. Cha et al. (2010) measured user influence in Twitter and found that retweets and mentions showed great overlap, while followers gained… not so much. However, Kwak et al. (2010) in contrast found followers and page rank to be similar, while ranking by retweets differed.

investigated to what extent consumers engaged on brand tweets based on 4 dimensions:  amplification (retweets), reach (followers), conversations (mentions) and attitude (sentiment).

Popular measures are the 3F’s (friends, fans & followers).

following a great amount of people primarily affects a brand’s follower count. It doesn’t correlate with the other, more actionable, metrics. In fact, those brands perform worse on the other measures. Ergo, brands that over-focus on increasing their follower count, perform worse based on the other metrics

All interactions, whether it be likes, shares or wallposts, increase the EdgeRank which in turn exposes more fans to your content.

As the number of fans grew, so did the number of engaged fans (the interactions per mille stayed about the same). These two elements act as a positive spiral constantly growing the other.

I pose that the amount of fans, followers or friends is a relevant metric, considering it as the potential interaction userbase. Taking in consideration that your goal is to increase the number of engaged users.

Reach, amplification, conversations and sentiment appear to measure the same kind of digital influence. Brands that over-focus on increasing their follower count, perform worse based on the other metrics. Increase your user base – as your fans grow, so will the number of engaged fans