The difference between output, outcome and impact metrics
Launch library · evergreen read
Output metrics simply count activity that occurred during a campaign: how many releases were sent, how many articles were placed, how many posts went live across the period. They describe effort, and effort is easy to measure, which is exactly why it gets measured so often by default.
Outcome metrics describe an actual change in the audience itself rather than mere activity, shifts in awareness, consideration or intent, and require considerably more work to capture properly, since they demand some genuine form of measurement beyond simply counting what was produced and published that week.
Impact metrics connect that audience change to something the organisation genuinely cares about at a deeper level, revenue, reputation, policy influence, and are the hardest of the three to prove cleanly, because many other forces act on those outcomes at exactly the same time, even in organisations that have handled similar moments before.
Reporting only output metrics is tempting because the resulting numbers are large and easy to gather quickly for a report, but a campaign can generate impressive output while producing almost no meaningful outcome or genuine impact at all in the end, especially when the story could easily be read more than one way.