BETA
This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here

More From Forbes

Edit Story

The Six Most Effective Social Media Metrics To Understand Your Campaign's Success

Forbes Agency Council
POST WRITTEN BY
Bob McKay

One of the most exciting aspects of digital and social media marketing is also one of the most challenging, since it’s always changing. Platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter constantly release new features, policy changes and algorithm updates that influence the way we approach our campaign tactics. The key to optimizing your social media performance is data.

Measuring your results from these campaigns is always a top priority. The main challenge is figuring out which metrics are most important and how to apply them. In other words, it’s not just as simple as looking at "likes." Here are the metrics we deem most important for our clients based on campaign type for both organic, unpaid social media efforts and paid ad campaigns.

Organic Campaigns

Link clicks: In Facebook Insights, you can see overall clicks on your posts, but you can also break it down further to see specific link clicks. Link clicks are the most important, because they show the most relevant form of engagement. This tells you your audience is interested enough to learn more, and if they're on your own site, you can track their journey from there.

A client of ours once wished to boost a Facebook post (an uploaded photo with a link in the text above) for clicks. Initially, he was not pleased since the post received a high number of clicks but a low number of conversions on his site. It turned out that he was looking at total clicks and not link clicks, which required a different evaluation. Since total clicks were so much higher than link clicks, we were able to attribute a significant amount of page "likes" to that particular post. The difference helps you to attribute your successes (and failures) more efficiently.

Reach versus impressions: Reach is the number of people who see a post, while impressions are the number of times the ad was seen. For example, if an ad was shown to the same person twice, it would count as one reach and two impressions. If your campaign goal is to get your ad in front of a specific number of people or get the word out to as many people as possible, then reach would be the appropriate metric to look at. If your goal is to have your ad shown a specific number of times to your audience to increase brand awareness, then impressions would be a suitable metric to look at. It all depends on what your goal is.

Platform engagement: Platform engagement here means likes, retweets, shares, comments, follows, etc., and while probably overrated in terms of its importance for driving ROI, it is helpful for appearance's sake in terms of interesting content. Though it's less reliable than link clicks, it can help increase reach and impressions when people interact with your content. For example, if you do work for a networking business where social media brand optics are important to its operations, Facebook reactions become legitimate metrics to keep track of in your campaign.

Paid Ads

Conversions: Whether it’s a form-fill, a signup or an e-commerce buy, you must have a conversion goal in mind when creating ads. This provides a direct ROI for your efforts, which is crucial. Our first step when taking over a client’s Facebook is installing the base pixel on their website, and then setting up the conversion event code that is relevant to them. By using the pixel to track the journey from the Facebook sponsored post all the way to the purchase screen on their site, we can track people’s digital paths.

Sometimes it’s even simpler than installing a pixel code. On LinkedIn, you can use lead generation forms as the goal of your sponsored content campaign, and interested individuals can have a seamless path to contacting your business and becoming a lead. Whether it’s ticket sales or lead forms, paid social media campaigns should provide ROI in a trackable way.

Forbes Agency Council is an invitation-only community for executives in successful public relations, media strategy, creative and advertising agencies. Do I qualify?

Button clicks: On Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram ads, there is oftentimes a call-to-action button, like "Contact Us," "Learn More," "Buy Now" etc. These are the best types of clicks to attain because they show the most direct intent.

In our experience, tracking button clicks is best in Facebook Ads Manager and Instagram for a specific B2B client of ours. Due to its high cost of conversion, we couldn’t just use conversions as a metric. We first looked at just link clicks, and they were even across the board. We then looked at button clicks and saw that one ad had far more than others. This told us that more people were expressing explicit intent to convert, which was effective because the ad with the most button clicks had the most conversions when the campaign ended.

Relevance score: The relevancy score ranges from 1-10 (10 being the highest) and is the best way to see the bang-for-your-buck about how the ad is performing in the Facebook algorithm. It lets you know how effective the pairing of your creative is with your audience and can assist you with campaign optimization.

To test this system, we set up a campaign with three different ad sets, each with identical creatives but with different target audiences. This allowed us to gain insights into which audience was the most appropriate for our campaign goal based on the relevancy score each ad set received. We then targeted the audience that had the highest relevancy score and tested different creatives against each other to achieve the highest reach. There’s no use speculating about what audience, creative or strategy might work best when you can just check the numbers.

Social media isn’t just some vague, unmeasurable, slight benefit to your business. There are all sorts of metrics to use, and that data can be leveraged to ensure improvement, optimization and overall effectiveness of campaigns.