“How do you measure whether a campaign worked?”

The two non-creative people on the panel are waiting for this question. They have paid for campaigns before and never learned whether they worked. If you answer with likes and followers, you confirm their fear. If you answer with a goal, a baseline, indicators and a result, you become the person they can defend to their director. The structure is simple and it works for a vaccination campaign, a mobile money promotion or a university enrolment drive.

1. 1Set the goal before the first post, as a number with a date: “20 percent more clinic visits in two months”, “3,000 merchant registrations in six weeks”, “400 applications by 30 August”.
2. 2Record the baseline: the same number for the month before, so you can show change and not just activity.
3. 3Choose indicators at three levels: reach (how many saw it), engagement (comments, shares, saves, click-through) and actions (visits, calls, sign-ups, sales, coverage in other outlets). Actions are what the goal is made of.
4. 4Know where each number comes from: Meta Business Suite and TikTok analytics for reach and engagement, a promo code or a WhatsApp line for actions, the clinic register or the sales system for the real result, the radio station's log for airtime.
5. 5Compare with the goal and the baseline, work out the cost per result, and write one lesson: what you would do more of and less of next time.