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: 

 

As a website owner, what one wants to do is drive enormous amount of traffic to one’s website so as to maximise the conversion rate with a view to increasing profitability of one’s venture manifold.

To be able to achieve the desired results for the website, one needs to engage in something called ‘Search Engine Optimization (SEO)’, which refers to the process of enhancing the visibility of a website across a number of search engines, such as Google & Bing, in an organic manner.

SEO, as simple and easy as it may seem from a distance, is a very intricate process in reality and could consume a considerable amount of time before producing noticeable results for any website.

Owing to a number of intricacies involved in its implementation, SEO is often assigned to digital marketing experts by business clients with a web presence. In return for a certain amount of fees, the experts make all the efforts required to optimize the websites for search engines.

Soon after the task of SEO implementation is handed over to online marketing professionals, most of the businesses start to grapple with a nagging question, i.e. How Long Does It Take To See Results After SEO is applied to their websites?

While the above-mentioned question posed by business clients is a genuine one as every firm wants to make the most of each dollar spent, it is not often addressed or answered to the clients’ satisfaction by online marketing specialists.

This article is an attempt to shine some light on the question that has been the cause of worries to many so far.

Generally speaking, an effective SEO campaign for a new site should start working or displaying results 4 to 6 months after it is first put into practice. However, it might take longer for results to crop up if any website is constrained by a small budget or has been penalised by Google or other search engines in the past for its adoption of black-hat strategies.

As a website grows older, its overall performance improves on account of continuous efforts into SEO application. This is why one would see a 12-month optimized website ranking much better and attracting much more traffic than a website that has been optimized for search engines for 6 months only.

Outlined below is the structure of SEO and how it evolves over time to give clients an understanding of why it takes 4-6 months to see SEO-driven results:

 

First Month – Focus On Research

The very first month is dedicated to carrying out research work, encompassing keyword research, competitive analysis, assessment of technical requirements and content audit, for the assigned website by an SEO professional.

Please note that the amount of time needed to conduct research work would vary and mostly depend on the size of the website as well as the scope of the SEO project. Hence, small-sized websites may be researched in less than a month, whereas other websites containing a large number of pages might take more than a month to be thoroughly researched.

An investigation into the scope of damage resulting from the previous implementation of black-hat SEO strategies is also to be conducted in the first month itself as this would help offset the impact of any such damage in the following months.

By the end of the first month, the online marketing specialist should have all pieces of research work documented for future reference.

 

Second Month – Focus On Technical Aspects Of Website

The digital marketing professional enters the second month with access to meaningful SEO insights (derived from the analysis of research data gathered in the first month) that enable to proceed further with a clear sense of direction and purpose.

The second month is basically devoted to fixing the technical loopholes of the website so that it could be easily crawled, indexed and ranked by search engines. The volume of technical issues to be dealt with in this stage is determined by the result of ‘site audit’ conducted in the very first month.

In line with the technical concerns pointed out by the ‘site audit’, the website may need to be either completely modified or tweaked slightly so as to allow the web spiders to crawl through it easily.

In particular, the following technical aspects are looked into and any issues related to the same are dealt with by the online marketing specialist:

Meta Tags-

Meta Tags are the key components of HTML web pages that must be optimized for gaining visibility on search engines.

Of all the meta tags, there are four in particular that need be paid utmost attention to – Title, Description, Keyword and Refresh.

The online marketing professional ensures that main keyword for every page of the website is included into the title, description and keyword meta tags so that each page gets better ranking for its specific relevant keyword across all search engines.

URLs (Universal Resource Locators)-

The SEO professional is also to check if URLs contain specific keywords for the pages that one gets directed to. A URL with a keyword helps optimize a web page for search engines and hence, is given due consideration.

Sitemaps-

A sitemap is the structure of a website with links to all of its pages that are available for being crawled and indexed.

Both HTML sitemap and XML sitemap are to be created (if not already generated), showcasing clear and logical structure of the site in question. While there is not much to be done in relation to HTML sitemap after it has been created, one needs to submit XML sitemap to the search engines via webmaster tools to allow for smooth crawling and indexing of website pages.

Site Performance-

Many site performance factors, including page load time, size of images and site responsiveness to a wide variety of devices, are worked on by the online expert with a view to enhancing the visibility of the overall website on search engines.

Internal Links –

Linking one page of a website to another page of the same site makes it SEO-friendly. So, the digital marketing specialist has the responsibility to incorporate internal links into various pages of the site so as to make it easily crawlable.

Crawl Errors –

Webmaster tools may point out certain errors, including DNS errors, server errors, robots failure and URL errors, which make it difficult for search engines to crawl the given website. These errors have to be appropriately resolved by the SEO specialist so that web spiders could easily crawl the website.

Content –

The SEO consultant is also to look at whether pages of the given site have duplicate content or not. If some or all of the pages are found to contain duplicate content, these are re-drafted in this stage itself.

 

Third Month – Focus On Content Creation

In the third month, the task for the digital marketing professional is to create meaningful content around specific keywords and target audience in various formats with a view to enhancing the site’s ranking for the chosen keywords across various search engines over time.

While content creation may seem an expensive affair, business clients must invest into it to be able to reap benefits, including increased brand loyalty, recognition as a thought leader, high number of leads and growing sales, quality back-links to the site and enhanced visibility on search engines, in the long-term.

The types of content, which are known to fetch benefits, include blogging, whitepapers, case studies, infographics, videos, product catalogues and e-books. Take a look at this useful infographic on content creation for more tips and information.

Please note that content creation has to be an ongoing activity for any site and must be continuously worked on by the SEO professional in the following months too.

 

Fourth Month – Focus On Links

As stated earlier, the fourth month would also see relevant content creation with a view to drawing quality back-links to the site.

Additionally, issues related to toxic links and manual penalties are supposed to be dealt with by the digital marketing consultant in this month.

In order to further gain natural back-links to the site, the online marketing professional engages in offering guest posts to other authoritative and relevant websites.

While gaining ‘follow’ links is vital to rank higher, bringing in ‘no-follow’ links is equally important to allow the site to appear normal and natural to the web spiders. So, both types of links should be aimed at by the specialist in this stage of SEO implementation.

 

Fifth Month – Focus On Being Social

As the digital marketing expert moves into the fifth month, he/she engages in setting up social media accounts across the relevant platforms with a view to increasing brand awareness, distributing the produced content, and enhancing the overall profitability resulting from the increased traffic.

Importance of social media has increased manifold lately and owing to the same reason, search engines have started taking into account the social media activities of online brands while deciding on their rankings.

In spite of social media being an expensive matter, a client must stick at nothing to invest in building a strong social media presence in order to gain better visibility on search engines.

Inclusion of social media into an overall SEO strategy is what the digital marketer does in this particular stage.

 

Sixth Month – Focus On Analytics-Driven Optimisation

By the 6^th month, the client should be able to see some traffic and results on the site on account of efforts put in by the hired digital marketer in the previous months.

In addition to being engaged in content creation and distribution of produced content via social media platforms, the online marketing specialist, at this stage, gets on with digging into analytics to tweak the ongoing campaigns for achieving better SEO results in the following months.

The online marketing expert logs in to analytics tool to check on a number of performance metrics, including but not limited to ‘total number of page views’, ‘average time spent on the website by a visitor’, ‘bounce rate’, ‘demographics of visitors by language, country and city’, ‘behaviour flow’, and ‘conversion rate’.

After all the performance metrics are thoroughly analysed, useful insights come into existence. These insights are then fed into content creation strategy, link building strategy and social media strategy with the aim of improving the site’s visibility across search engines further.

 

The essence of the article is that there is no short-cut to success in any walk of life. If a site tries to gain good ranking fast using black-hat SEO strategies, it will have to eventually suffer from penalties because algorithms deployed by search engines are now smart enough to catch and punish those who engage in spammy activities. So, SEO campaigns need be nurtured over a sufficient amount of time to produce quality traffic and other desired results for any given website.