Driven by the declining organic reach of the posts and humongous growth in the volume of content being shared across social media channels, digital marketers are constantly fighting to get space for their branded content in the news feed section of their audience/followers. This has led many marketers to incorporate social media advertising into their overall strategy so as to achieve their social media objectives ranging from ‘Brand Awareness’ to ‘Customer Experience’ to ‘Business Conversions’ to ‘Online Reputation Management’.

Social ads, when executed in line with the strategy laid out in the social media marketing plan, could result in increased customer reach and revenue growth for your brand. However, you need to identify key metrics that align well with your social medial goals and objectives before running any social advertisement campaign. Otherwise, it would be extremely difficult for you as a marketer to prove return on investment to the concerned stakeholders.

To help you perform well in the arena of social media advertising, this article will cover 6 important social media ad metrics for you to keep track of in the following section. 

1.     CPC, CPM & CPA – In the world of digital advertising, you have basically three ways to pay for advertisements, i.e. cost per click (CPC), cost per thousand impressions (CPM) and cost per action CPA. 

In case of cost-per-click payment option, an ad could be served to the chosen audience thousands of times on a specific social media platform. However, the advertiser is charged only when someone clicks on the advertisement which is usually aimed at driving traffic to non-gated content (information that could be viewed without entering any personal information). 

Contrary to CPC option, you are charged for every thousand impression of your ad on a publisher’s website and/or other affiliated websites under CPM payment method. This is useful when your intent is to spread awareness about your brand amid your target audience. 

On the heels of CPC and CPM options comes cost per action (CPA) in which an advertiser pays the publisher for a wide range of actions, including but not limited to page likes, offer claims, link clicks and mobile app installs. This method is the best one if you are looking to get the chosen audience to take any action, such as downloading any gated content (requiring one to fill up a form), signing up for a webinar or redeeming a code. By choosing to proceed with CPA option, you are only paying for actions that best fulfil your social media goals and objectives.  

2.     Conversions – A conversion is nothing but an action that you would like someone viewing your ad to take. This could be a purchase, download, click, sign-up, form-fill or a webinar. By measuring conversions, you are well on your way to prove return on investment for a specific ad campaign to the stakeholders as the conversion is closely linked to your social goal. If your goal is to get your whitepaper downloaded by the target audience, you should pay for the same action rather than clicks on an ad or the total number of impressions. As mentioned previously, a CPA ad is the best one for keeping track of conversions. 

If the intent of your social media ad is to get traffic to a landing page with a view to maximizing the number of whitepaper downloads, you must incorporate UTM parameters into the links of your ad to be able to gauge the effectiveness of a specific ad and track conversions better. You could use Google’s free URL Builder tool for the same purpose. Make sure to insert the following: 

Source: It refers to the source of the traffic to a landing page. Is it Google, Facebook or Twitter?

Medium: This indicates the type of marketing method used to drive traffic. Is it CPC or CPA or CPM?

Campaign: This could include the name of the campaign or campaign keyword, such as social media whitepaper download. 

Please note that you would need to set up Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel and Conversion Tracking tags on your website or landing page to be able to track such social media conversions. The URL Builder would basically help you understand which all social media channels (where ad campaign is being run) are yielding better returns if an ad is being run on multiple social channels simultaneously. Are the ad copies served to the audience on Facebook and Instagram resonating well with the target audience and yielding a better conversion rate than the ads being run on Twitter and LinkedIn? Based on the data collected from Google Analytics and other social media analytics, you could either tweak your non-performing ads to produce better results or discontinue them completely to improve ROI. 

3.     Click-through rate – CTR is a useful metric when it comes to understanding the effectiveness of an ad campaign. It basically refers to the percentage of the total number of clicks on an ad to the total number of ad impressions. For example, CTR for a specific social ad would work out to be 5% if the ad was clicked by 50 viewers out of a total of 1000 impressions. 

Besides giving a glimpse of how well an ad is performing, a good CTR will improve the quality score of the ad which, in turn, would cut down on the total cost. Always look at CTR in the context of how the referred traffic is interacting with the landing page. Metrics such as bounce rate, average time on page and average pageviews would give further insight into whether the landing page is well designed and aligned to the call-to-action mentioned in the ad. 

4.     Traffic activity – It is always a good idea to keep track of how well a social ad is contributing to the actions being taken on your website during the campaign period. For example, if you are diverting traffic to a landing page to download a whitepaper through a social media ad, you may want to use Google Analytics to look at the spike in the number of unique visitors on your landing page and whether the unique visitors contributed well to the conversions or not during the existence of the campaign.  

5.     Mobile traffic – Compare the traffic coming from a desktop with that coming from a mobile device to be able to determine if your target audience is most active on mobile device or desktops. You can even dig deeper into which browser or operating system is being mostly used to click on your social ad and what is the bounce rate like after traffic is diverted to the landing page. Do you see a high click-through rate followed by a high bounce rate on a mobile device that is responsible for a large chunk of mobile traffic? It could mean that your landing page needs to be further optimized for the specific device for a higher level of engagement and better conversions. 

To be able to check on mobile traffic, you could create a separate dashboard on Google Analytics indicating data such as mobile traffic, bounce rate, visit duration and organic keywords. 

6.     Cost to acquire a lead – It is very important to determine how much it costs to acquire a lead so as to calculate return on investment later on. This could be calculated by dividing the total cost incurred in acquiring leads through a social media campaign by the total number of leads acquired through the campaign. For example, if you spent $3000 acquiring 50 leads, the cost to acquire one lead would be $60. Make sure to use UTM Parameters in all the social ad links to be able to figure out if a specific lead has resulted from a social media ad campaign or any other source. 

Remember that setting up of clear and precise social media goals is the key to understanding which metrics to keep track of so as to determine the effectiveness of any social media ad campaign. I hope that the above-discussed metrics would help you justify your social media efforts and prove ROI to the stakeholders. 

Please feel free to comment on what social media ad metrics you keep track of in order to justify social ad spending at your organisation. I look forward to continuing the discussion further with you. 

Before we discuss about what we mean by social media goals and why we need these, we need to get clarity on social media objectives. Are you wondering how social media goals are different from social media objectives? If you do, I don’t blame you for the same. In fact, I was not clear about the difference too when I began my digital marketing career about 5 years back. So, let us unearth the subtle difference between the two terminologies.

An objective, which precedes setting up of goals, is nothing but the answer to ‘what’ social media will help your firm achieve eventually. It could range from ‘brand awareness’ to ‘customer experience’ to ‘business conversions’ to ‘online reputation management’ to what not.

Once you have decided on the objectives, you will move on to determine social media goals that would precisely indicate ‘how’ and ‘when’ you are going to achieve the set objective. In short, the specifics of attaining an objective are what we call goals.

To deepen our understanding of social media goals, we will dive into a widely used framework, i.e. SMART. Basically, this framework maintains that any goal should be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and timely. Let us take a look at each of the five traits of a goal one after another: