To help you understand the key metrics for measuring the success of your social media advertising campaigns, we asked twelve industry professionals, including heads of creative marketing and digital marketing managers, to share their insights. From measuring the engagement rate to evaluating campaign reach, discover the diverse range of metrics these experts deem essential and why they matter. Here’s how to measure the success of your social media advertising.
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- Engagement Rate: Measuring Audience Interaction
- Customer Satisfaction: Reflecting Brand Perception
- Follower Growth: Improving Offerings
- ROAS: Gauging Financial Returns
- Demo Bookings: Correlating Potential Revenue
- Dwell Time: Monitoring User Engagement
- Campaign Goal Metrics: Optimizing Campaigns
- Click-Throughs and Purchases: Reach the Right Audience
- Engagement Over Likes: Dismissing Vanity Metrics
- Follower Growth Rate: Assessing Audience Expansion
- Conversion Rate: Tracking Conversion Events
- Impressions: Evaluating Campaign Reach
Engagement Rate: Measuring Audience Interaction
At PartyLite, we take pride in the success of our Instagram campaigns, and one key metric we closely monitor is the “Engagement Rate.” Engagement Rate is a vital measure as it gauges the level of interaction and connection our content establishes with our audience. It encompasses likes, comments, shares, and saves, reflecting the depth of engagement beyond mere passive viewing.
This metric is particularly important because it offers insights into the effectiveness of our content strategy. A high Engagement Rate signifies that our content resonates with our followers, sparking genuine interest and encouraging them to actively engage. It demonstrates that our storytelling, visual aesthetics, and messaging align with the preferences of our audience, fostering a sense of community and loyalty among our followers.
This helps us maintain a dynamic and impactful Instagram presence, ensuring that we continue to forge meaningful connections with our audience and drive business growth.
Manuela Cataldo, Head of Creative Marketing, PartyLite
Customer Satisfaction: Reflecting Brand Perception
As a social media marketer, I’ve found that customer satisfaction is the most reliable metric to use when measuring the success of a campaign.
Customer satisfaction is important because it’s a way to measure how your audience feels about your brand and whether or not they feel engaged with it. If your customers are happy, you know you’re doing something right.
Of course, customer satisfaction isn’t just about creating content that people like; you also have to be sure that you’re reaching out to customers in ways that resonate with them. Is your audience responding well to ads on Twitter? Are they finding value in the content you’re sharing? If so, then consider using this information as part of your future strategy.
Noel Griffith, CMO, SupplyGem
Follower Growth: Improving Offerings
The “follower growth” metric is used to measure the success of a social media advertising campaign. Believing in organic followers, regardless of their size, is important. Even if it’s 50 followers, they should be organic.
The number of new followers is subtracted from the number of past followers before the campaign to get the number gained. Knowing how many followers have been gained can help improve offerings. Automated tools are used for convenience to get insights about the followers to nurture ROI.
Brandon Rubinshtein, Founder, Howdy
ROAS: Gauging Financial Returns
At Click Intelligence, the key metric to gauge the efficacy of our social media advertising campaigns is Return on Ad Spend (ROAS). While likes, shares, and comments can depict engagement, ROAS provides a tangible measure of the financial returns against the advertising dollars spent.
For instance, in a recent campaign executed for an e-commerce client, every dollar spent on social ads yielded $8 in sales, resulting in a ROAS of 800%. This metric is crucial because it directly ties our efforts to revenue generation, offering a clear picture of campaign profitability.
In a landscape where proving the monetary impact of marketing is essential, ROAS stands as a testament to our campaigns’ genuine value.
Simon Brisk, Director, Click Intelligence Ltd
Demo Bookings: Correlating Potential Revenue
One of the primary metrics we prioritize when evaluating the success of our social media advertising campaigns is the number of demo bookings. These bookings are not just mere engagement metrics like likes or shares; they signify a deeper interest and intent from potential clients to understand our product or service better.
When a user schedules a demo, it indicates that our campaign has successfully transitioned them from passive observers to active participants. It’s crucial because it directly correlates with potential revenue and provides a tangible measure of a campaign’s effectiveness in driving genuine business opportunities.
Jaya Iyer, Marketing Assistant, Teranga Digital Marketing
Dwell Time: Monitoring User Engagement
When evaluating social media advertising campaigns, a crucial metric is dwell time. This measures the duration users spend engaging with your content.
Longer dwell times signify captivating ads that hold viewer interest, fostering better brand engagement and message resonance. Monitoring dwell time enables optimizing strategies for more compelling and effective campaigns.
Furthermore, having a higher dwell time ensures content alignment with user expectations and interests. Leveraging insights from dwell time enables refining strategies by adjusting messages, enhancing visuals, and recalibrating targeting.
In the ever-evolving social media landscape, dwell time functions as a compass, steering content towards genuine engagement and resonant experiences that foster campaign success and, along with that, a high conversion rate.
Robin Francis, Digital Marketing Executive, Growthlabs
Campaign Goal Metrics: Optimizing Campaigns
The best metric to measure the effectiveness of your social media advertising depends on the goals you have set for yourself. For example, if your primary goal is to increase brand awareness, metrics like reach and impressions are better indicators than clicks or views.
On the other hand, if your goal is more conversion-focused, such as sales or website visits, then click-through rate (CTR) and cost per acquisition (CPA) would be more useful. Additionally, metrics such as cost per lead (CPL) or cost per action (CPA) are important to track for campaigns that include lead generation.
By understanding which metrics best match your objectives, you can focus on optimizing your campaigns to increase ROI.
Tracking your KPIs (key performance indicators) is important for understanding the effectiveness of your campaigns. These KPIs help you to identify areas that need improvement and gauge how effective your campaigns have been in achieving your desired goals.
Tristan Harris, Demand Generation Senior Marketing Manager, Thrive Digital Marketing Agency
Click-Throughs and Purchases: Reach the Right Audience
I’d say one of the most important metrics I use to measure the success of my social media advertising campaigns is the number of people who have clicked through to our website and then made a purchase. If you’re trying to sell something online, this is really important.
You can’t just advertise and hope that people will come—you have to give them a reason to click through. You need to make sure they know what they’ll get when they click through, and that it’s worth their time. That way, you can be sure you’re reaching the right audience in order for your ads to be successful.
Rengie Wisper, Marketing Manager, SupplyGem
Engagement Over Likes: Dismissing Vanity Metrics
Engagement is, and has been, the most important metric when it comes to social media presence. You can have a very small following, but also a very active one.
The reason for this is that you want those interactions to go from your social media platform to your website or online shop. You want to make a connection that can lead to a phone call, an email, or a sale.
“Likes” are not the best way to measure success. In fact, that’s just vanity metrics, as people might just automatically “like” your post without even reading the content.
Robert Burns, Marketing Director, Oxygen Plus
Follower Growth Rate: Assessing Audience Expansion
Social media platforms are never looking to remain stagnant, but knowing how many people are interested enough to make us a permanent part of their feed indicates campaign effectiveness.
That is why we use “Follower Growth Rate.” It is important to maintain your current follower base, but if you notice that your latest campaign efforts are showing minimal growth, or even worse, have flatlined, then it is easy to assume that it is not driving interest.
By calculating the number of followers we have gained over a set period of time, measuring it against our current followers, and then multiplying that by 100, we can assess the projected audience growth and the number of shares that could boost that number in the future.
In using our Follower Growth Rate, we can determine whether our campaign is working or whether we need to take a new approach.
Ryan Rottman, Co-Founder and CEO, OSDB Sports
Conversion Rate: Tracking Conversion Events
I measure the success of my social media advertising campaigns by tracking my conversion rate. It measures how frequently social content initiates the process leading to a conversion event, such as a download, subscription, or sale. This is an important metric because it showcases the value of your social media campaigns and how they are tied into your funnel.
Daniel Climans, Senior Manager, Digital Marketing and Partnerships, StickerYou
Impressions: Evaluating Campaign Reach
In the realm of measuring the success of social media advertising campaigns, the concept of impressions takes center stage. This metric acts as a robust indicator, revealing the frequency with which an advertisement graces users’ screens. The essence lies in its ability to gauge campaign reach and visibility.
By meticulously monitoring the impressions metric, advertisers can unravel a treasure trove of insights pertaining to the cadence at which their content infiltrates the desired audience’s digital milieu.
This information enables them to adapt their strategies to enhance brand visibility and engagement. As impressions increase, it signifies that the ad is appearing in front of more people, increasing the likelihood of creating brand recognition and recall among the audience.
Joe Acosta, Digital Marketing Manager, BBQ Galore
