Which social metrics matter?

Working out your social media goals also means working out how you are going to track those goals.

If you’ve spent any time in this space or seen a social media report you’ll know there are literally hundreds of different metrics. Impressions, clicks, engagement, landing page views, purchases, downloads… the list goes on and on and on and on! (and on)

Some metrics are useful, some are less useful. It all depends on what you’re wanting to achieve.

One of the reasons we love social media marketing is because it is so (brutally) honest and quantifiable. Unlike other traditional advertising, you will know exactly where your time and efforts are going. Which means you can calculate your ROI. And you can make informed decisions based on data.

Before you dive into the depths of digital data, we’d recommend that you get a good handle on the metrics that matter. Getting across these will help you track your results and optimise your campaigns, so you can see those results as quickly as possible.

IMPRESSIONS 

Impressions is the total number of times your ad was shown to your target audience. This is different from Reach, which is the number of individual people who have seen your ad. We want to know exactly how many screens Facebook put your brand on. #BrandAwareness is everything especially at the early stages of a campaign.

AD FREQUENCY

This is the average number of times each individual has seen your ad. Frequency is calculated by Impressions divided by Reach. This is an important metric to pay attention to make sure you’re not overwhelming your audience with your ads. A rule of thumb is to keep the Frequency under 4 for feed/story ads.

LANDING PAGE VIEWS 

Click on how many people saw your ad, and then chose to click over to your website to learn more / take action. This tells you that people are liking what you are putting in front of their eyeballs and they want to learn more about what you can offer them. This is also the first step to building your retargeting audience! 

CTR

Click Through Rate (CTR) is the percent of people who saw your ad (impressions) and then clicked over to your landing page. CTR is an important metric because it helps you understand your customers — it tells you what works (and what doesn't work) when trying to reach your target audience. A low CTR could indicate that you're targeting the wrong audience or that you're not speaking their language persuasively enough to convince them to click.

ADD TO CART 

The amount of people who came over to your website to learn more, liked your product, added it to their cart BUT didn’t go through with the purchase for whatever reason, is greater than you’d hope. Don’t stress, we can capture them with a dedicated retargeting and now they are in sight!  

PURCHASES

Usually the holy grail metric for your ad efforts, purchases are how many people have gotten out their credit card (or used a buy now pay later service) #YAY. You will need to have a Facebook Pixel installed on your website to effectively track these. 

LEADS

If you are not selling a product, your goal may be to increase your database or receive form enquiries. This will appear as a ‘website lead’ metric in Facebook Ads Manager. As with Purchases, you will need your pixel correctly installed on your website to track this. 

COST PER LANDING PAGE VIEW

The total amount spent divided by the total landing page views. Depending on Industry, this should almost always be well under $2. Our average is $1.27.

COST PER PURCHASE

The total amount spent divided by the total purchases. This can fluctuate a lot depending on your product and price point, but ideally, this is less than 10% of the product cost, in a perfect case less than 5%.

AMOUNT SPENT 

The amount you have spent for your time frame selected. Tracking your spend regularly is super important, even if you have set your daily budget in the setup process. If you notice that Facebook is not utilising the full spend, there is likely an issue with your ads targeting or approvals. Trust me, they want to spend your money so if they aren’t, something is wrong! 

Here at FULL STOP, these are the metrics we are checking DAILY for clients. Setting and forgetting is not an option here. Day in day out we review and optimise. That’s how we consistently get the best #results.

If you are not sure if your ads are performing to their best ability, GET IN TOUCH and we will run a FREE REVIEW of your current ads.