How To Interpret Glow Metrics Guide

When you invest in brand awareness, it’s normal to see different metrics move in different directions. Each metric reflects a different signal in your overall marketing performance.

This guide explains how the three core Glow metrics work together and gives you a simple workflow for interpreting them inside your dashboard.

Glow breaks brand performance into three signals:

• Leading Indicators → Demand you’re creating

• Awareness ROAS → Demand you’re capturing now

• Blended ROAS → Overall business efficiency

Understanding how these signals move together helps you spot what’s working, what needs attention, and where to adjust spend.

What each metric tells you

Leading Indicators → Future demand creation

Answers: Are we growing brand interest and expanding our future customer base?

These indicators (e.g., Branded Search, Engaged Sessions) respond early to brand activity and show whether your message is landing.

Blended ROAS → Overall business efficiency

Answers: Do we have financial headroom to keep investing in brand?

This metric anchors everything - strong or stable efficiency gives you permission to scale.

Awareness ROAS → Short-term conversion efficiency

Answers: Are our awareness campaigns capturing some demand in the near term?

This does not replace the long-term lens; it simply adds context on immediate impact.

🔄 Workflow guide:

A step-by-step approach to interpreting Glow signals

Step 1 - Start with Blended ROAS

“Can we afford to invest in brand right now?”

Before analysing anything else, understand whether your efficiency is stable, strong, or under pressure.

How to apply this:

• Compare Blended ROAS against your business target.

• Look for drivers of change: seasonality, pricing, promotions, channel mix, site performance

Decision:

• Stable/ Above target: You have flexibility to create more demand → move to Step 2

• Below target: Efficiency risk → skip to Step 4 to diagnose what’s impacting performance
  
  

Step 2 - Look at Leading Indicators

“Is our brand activity creating future demand?”

Leading Indicators (Branded Search impressions, Engaged Sessions, etc.) tell you whether awareness activity is building interest in your brand.

How to apply this:

• Analyse your leading indicators in the short term (14-30 day trend)

• The strength of each indicator (High/Medium/Low in Glow)

• Whether movements line up with changes in spend, creative, or audiences
  
  

Decision:

• Up: Brand activity is resonating and growing future demand

• Flat: Some response, but inconsistent - may indicate limited reach or audience saturation

• Down: Awareness activity isn’t landing → review creative, audience saturation, channel mix
  
  

Once you understand demand creation, move to Step 3.

Step 3 - Check Awareness ROAS

“Are we capturing any of that demand right now?”

Awareness ROAS shows short-term conversion efficiency. It helps you understand immediate capture without replacing the long-term view.
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How to apply this:

• Check ROAS movement relative to changes in awareness spend

• Compare performance of new vs existing creatives

• Look at impressions distribution (fresh audiences vs retargeting-prone audiences)
  
  

Decision:

• Up: Strong sign your awareness is contributing immediately

• Flat: Demand might still be forming → revisit Leading Indicators

• Down: Common with new audiences → validate that Leading Indicators are trending positively
  
  

Step 4 - Combine the Signals

Now map what you’re seeing to one of these four scenarios.

1. Efficiency strong + Leading Indicators up

Pattern: Blended ROAS ↑ / Leading Indicators ↑

Meaning: Your business is efficient and brand demand is growing.

Potential Action:

• Increase or maintain awareness spend

• Double-down on creatives that drove the uplift

• Explore high-performing audiences
  
  

2. Efficiency stable/strong + Leading Indicators down

Pattern: Blended ROAS ↑ / Leading Indicators ↓

Meaning: You’re converting existing demand but not creating new demand.

Potential Action:

• Refresh creatives (especially top-of-funnel)

• Expand reach or try new audiences

• Allocate a portion of efficiency gains back into brand to rebuild momentum

3. Efficiency under pressure + Leading Indicators up

Pattern: Blended ROAS ↓ / Leading Indicators ↑

Meaning: Brand demand is building, but short term efficiency is declining.

Potential Action:

• Protect upper-funnel spend (don’t cut it — demand is forming)

• Fix lower-funnel inefficiencies (CRO, site, retargeting, bottom-funnel creative)

• Run a creative quality audit

4. All signals declining

Pattern: Blended ROAS ↓ / Leading Indicators ↓ / Awareness ROAS ↓

Meaning: Weak brand performance and poor efficiency.

Action:

• Check for external factors (competition, seasonality)

• Re-evaluate channel mix and creative strategy

• Focus short-term spend on proven, efficient channels

• Reset upper-funnel strategy with new creative + fresh reach

Step 5 - Turn insight into a hypothesis

Glow is most powerful when used to guide testable actions.

Examples you can use:

• “I shifted awareness share of wallet YoY to a new channel segment. If it works, I should see that my leading indicators rise more steeply than last year at this time within the first 14 days”

• “If I launch this new channel or a brand campaign in a market, I should see leading indicators increase YoY within the first 14 days to when I didn’t have this activity”

• “If this new messaging is landing, we should see Branded Search should lift week-on-week.”
  
  

Step 6 - Validate Over Time

Brand signals don’t move daily - the right cadence for Glow is weekly.

Check:

• Whether Leading Indicators continue trending up

• Whether Blended ROAS stays stable as you scale

• Whether Awareness ROAS eventually reflects some short-term lift