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Metrics to Track for Social Media Ads

social media advertising metrics

Social media platforms are great tools to share the latest news, upcoming events, answer customers' questions, and engage with the community. Businesses amplify social advertising services in order to reach more potential customers. The sophisticated targeting algorithm allows you to get in front of people who are discussing or may be interested in your business. 

Similar to other paid media campaigns, social advertising can be costly if not managed, analyzed, and optimized properly. Don't just set and forget! Focus on aligning optimization with your business goals and inbound marketing strategy. Track and measure key metrics that speak to the success of your social media ads. 

Most social media advertising metrics should help businesses answer the following questions: 

  • How many people are looking at your ads? 
  • How relevant and captivating are your ads?
  • How effective are your ads at converting? 

How many people are seeing your ads?

Rise above the noise in social media and reach the audience or communities your products or services truly fit into. 

Reach, a top-of-the-funnel metric, measures how many people your ads are getting in front of. Although, it may not be a great indicator of campaign success, you would still want to attract a substantial amount of targeted audience. High reach is an indication of strong brand awareness. The more people that recognize your brand and are familiar with your products or services, the more likely they are to convert.

Another metric that should be constantly measured is ad frequency. It tracks how many times the same audience have seen your ad. Keep a close watch on the ad frequency metric and rotate fresh content in as needed to avoid over-saturating your audience with the same ads. 

Effective distribution and high quality content are the key ingredients to maximizing social campaigns. 

How relevant and captivating are your ads? 

Ads that turn heads will bring in high engagement and amplification. Engagement is any interaction to the ad itself whether it is a click, a share, or a comment. Being able to see engagement to your sponsored posts will give you better insights on which content your audience prefers and which content they ignore.

Most ads are being ignored because they do not pertain to users' interests. Your ad relevancy is measured by a relevance score or quality scoreOnce your ad has been served more than 500 times it will be assigned a score from 1-10. An ad with a relevance score of 1 is bad. You would need to pay more for its visibility. Conversely, a relevance score of 7-10 means your ad's creative offer closely matches with what your users are looking for. The goal is to provide interesting and relevant ads that make users want to visit your website. 

Traffic metrics such as click-through-rate (CTR) and bounce rate provide better insights on the actions taken after viewing your ads. The percentage of clicks to your website's landing page, after viewing the ad, is your click-through rate. Whether or not, and how long, the person stays on the website is measured by bounce rate. Higher bounce rates means your audience is more likely to bounce out of your website after visiting.  

How effective are your ads at converting? 

Do users visit your website after viewing the ad? Do they sign-up for an event or make a purchase? What is your conversion goal from the social media campaign? 

A conversion is any action that raises the bottom line of your business goals such as website visits, form-fills, newsletter subscriptions, downloads, direct purchases, or event registrations. Closely measuring the conversion and cost spent allows you to measure your return-on-investment on the ad spend. Each conversion can be measured by cost-per-acquisition (CPA). Cost-per-acquisition calculates the revenue impact of the social ads, total cost of campaign divide by conversions . Conversion rates are a primary indicator of marketing success, but CPA provides the business perspective by which to gauge campaign success. 

Combined with the customer lifetime value, you can determine how much each action or transaction is worth to you. Lifetime value (LTV) is a prediction model attribute to the net profit attributed to the relationship with a customer. 

social media advertising metrics customer lifetime value calculation

Breaking down the budget allocation based on different goals will help you better manage and optimize your ad campaign. In the long run, it will allow you to calculate the return-on-ad-spend (ROAS) for specific ad campaigns.

social media advertising metrics return on ad spend calculation 

Understanding and continuously monitoring your advertising metrics will allow you to determine what ads to pause or modify, and reallocate spending. All of these metrics, especially click-through rate or bounce rate, vary industry to industry. The average metrics can be misleading without taking into context your own business. Whether the ad performance is good or bad all depends on how you segment and analyze your data.

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