Social media advertising is a force in the digital advertising space. Facebook’s social ads generated more than $6.8 billion in revenue, and that was in Q3 2016 alone.
Social ads provide an effective way to reach your customers, increase your revenue, and track your return on investment down to the penny. But before you start advertising, you should identify key metrics and learn how to track them.
It is unrealistic to think that a single social ad campaign can address one-year goals for your organization or help solve problems in the absence of a solid strategy. That’s why you should start any advertising campaign by matching your social goals with your business goals.
As our CEO Ryan Holmes pointed out, it’s best to mix paid and organic content on social media and use your organic content as a testing ground for paid campaigns.
New to social media advertising? Check out our complete guide to social ads.
8 social media ad metrics you need to watch
1. Cost per transaction
There are three ways to pay for your ads: cost-per-impression (CPM), cost-per-click (CPC), and cost-per-action (CPA).
With cost-per-impression, you pay each time your ad is viewed. This can be a costly approach that doesn’t necessarily lead to any type of conversion. Cost-per-click is typically used for display ads; Your ad may be viewed thousands of times, but you only pay unless someone clicks it. This is useful if you are directing people to unauthorized content (content that does not require viewers to enter an email or other information to access the content).
And then there’s the cost per action, which is you only pay for selected transactions. For example, cost per action on Facebook includes Page likes, requests for bids, mobile app installs and link clicks, and you can choose the ones that are most relevant to your campaign. This is the best approach if you’re aiming to get the viewer to take action beyond a click, for example, if you’re trying to get people to download gated content (which requires filling out a form), signing up for a webinar. or use a code.
Cost per transaction has two major advantages. First, you can drill down and only pay for actions that align with your campaign goals. Second, you can better track leads and new customers by optimizing conversions like form filling or downloads.
2. Conversions
A conversion is defined as a specific action that you define for your campaign, such as a purchase, download, click, sign up, form fill, or webinar.
By measuring conversions on your social ad, you can better understand your campaign’s ROI. This is because what you are watching is closely linked to an action related to your cause. If your goal is to register for the webinar, this is what you have to pay for (and watch) for, not just the number of impressions or clicks on an ad. By creating CPA ads, you’ll be better prepared to track conversions.
How to track conversions:
If your ad is drawing people to your website, a landing page, or content, you should be using UTM parameters on all your links for ads. UTM parameters allow you to track actions, purchases, and goal completions for each piece of content you publish.
You can generate UTM parameters for links in your ads using Google’s URL Generator. Make sure you fill out the following:
- Source: The social network with the ad
- Middle: The type of content you are sharing
- Offer: Name of the campaign or campaign keyword
Note that you must have Google Analytics on your website to track conversions. Check out our guide to tracking social media in Google Analytics for setup.
3. Click-through rate
If you run cost-per-click ads, you should monitor the ratio of people who see the ad to the number of people who click. Click-through rate (CTR) is determined by taking the number of clicks and dividing by impressions. For example, if you had three clicks and 1,000 impressions, your CTR would be 0.3 percent.
In addition to understanding the success of a particular social ad, a better CTR can improve your quality scores and lower your costs. The better your ad performs, the lower the cost.
Remember that you want to look at more than clicks. You also want to understand how people interact with the content you send them. Bounce rate, average time on page, and average page views per visit help you understand whether the actual content you’re sending people is living up to the promise of social advertising.
4. Traffic activity
It’s important to know how your social ad contributes to your overall traffic to your destination, such as your website. Spikes in activity can show how engaging your campaign is, how many unique/new visits you’ve had, and what your conversion rates look like. To better understand what your traffic means, you should look at it in the context of conversions, traffic sources, and leads.
How to track social traffic:
When you sign in to Google Analytics, the main dashboard has an overview of your website traffic. Adjust dates accordingly to monitor traffic during your actual campaign period. If you’re running an annual campaign, it’s a good idea to compare year-over-year with your previous campaign period.
5. Traffic sources
If you get tons of website traffic during your campaign period, that’s great. But if you don’t know where the traffic is coming from, then you will struggle to show exactly how much social has contributed. You’ll also want to know which ads are performing well and why so you can replicate successful formulas. For example, if you’re running an ad campaign on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram and you’re driving people to the same content, you’ll want to know what network and ad is sending people to the site.
How to track your traffic sources:
If you’re running ads on multiple channels (or if you’re running different ads on the same network), you should use UTM parameters in your URLs. This helps you track visitor numbers and identify which ads are successful.
As mentioned earlier, Google’s Campaign URL Generator allows you to add a unique URL so you can track your campaigns in Google Analytics. To monitor traffic from private links, go to your Traffic Sources report in Google Analytics and click Traffic Sources in the left menu.
6. Mobile traffic
A large number of people interacting with your content come from a mobile device. It’s important to know what traffic is coming from mobile devices, what their behavior is, and which social ads resonate best. That way, you can plan your social campaigns to make sure you’re targeting the right people on the right devices. You can understand things like mobile visits, page views, bounce rate, traffic by source, and mobile keywords.
How to monitor mobile traffic:
You can create a mobile dashboard in Google Analytics. This allows you to view things like mobile traffic, bounce rate, visit time, and organic keywords. To view your mobile traffic, go to Audience, select Mobile and select Overview. Next, choose a date range and select the data you want to compare.
7. The cost of acquiring a lead
To report the ROI for any social ad campaign, you need to calculate the cost of lead acquisition (CAL). To determine the CAL, simply divide your ad spend by the number of leads generated during the campaign period. Your most successful campaigns will generate high-quality leads at the lowest cost.
How to track leads:
A simple way to track leads for a social campaign is to use your social ad to drive people to content that requires form-filling or to run events that require registration. If you’re sending people to your website or landing page, be sure to use UTM parameters to determine if leads are coming from your campaign.
If you’re wondering how your social ads impact ‘offline leads’ like store visits, Facebook has introduced new measurement tools that will allow businesses with real-location locations to see how many people visit the store after seeing a Facebook campaign ad.
8. Customer conversion rate
If you want to go one step beyond tracking leads, you can track the number of leads that turn into customers from your social ads. This will go beyond the social ads themselves and help you identify where your customers are leaving and/or converting.
How to monitor conversion rate:
By creating a Facebook Pixel and applying it to your website, you can track conversions without changing your website code. Facebook’s Pixel guide will give you all the steps to get started and let you define conversions.
Google Analytics also allows you to add conversion tracking tags to your campaigns to track what people do after they click your ad. If you set and define goals for your website in Google Analytics, you can measure how often people complete certain actions.
Monitor your social ad performance
By setting clear goals and knowing which metrics are important to your campaign, you will gain a better understanding of what is going well and how you can improve. You will also have more tangible data to prove the ROI of social media for your business.
Manage, optimize and monitor the performance of your social ads across multiple networks using Moyens I/O. Advertising options are available for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest. Learn more and create your ad today.
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