Advertising on social media is an important way to get more traffic to your website or webshop and ultimately increase your conversion (however you express it). How do you know if your social media strategy is working and if your advertising campaign is effective? We present 7 metrics to monitor during the campaign. This way you keep a close eye on what works and what doesn't and you can adjust in time.
1. Reach
The first metric to keep an eye on is reach, the reach, of your campaign. You can define the reach as the number of people who have seen your advertisement. Don't confuse reach with impressions, a number that can be much higher than reach. Impressions are the number of times an ad has been shown and an ad can of course be shown multiple times to the same person. Reach really says something about the number of individuals who have had the advertisement on their screen.
Building a large reach is especially important for creating brand awareness. The more people know about your brand, the easier it will be to reach them in the future. In addition, your brand becomes top of mind for the customer so that they think of you more quickly when a purchase becomes relevant for the customer.
Every platform you advertise on registers the reach of the advertisement. Collect this data to see where you can get the most eyes on you.
2. Engagement (interaction)
Engagement is the extent to which customers interact with the ad or content you advertise. An interaction can be a like, click or comment. It is important to monitor the interaction because you then know whether the content you are highlighting is also relevant to the user. A lot of reach without interaction means that you have to make your advertisement, offer or content more fun, better, more beautiful or more relevant.
3. Amplification rate
Interaction is the first step towards amplification, or strengthening your message. By retweeting, sharing and reposting messages, users distribute your content in their own network. This way you increase your reach without having to budget more. By reposting and sharing messages, your audience sends a clear signal that they feel connected to your brand and that they believe others should do the same. You have created true ambassadors for your brand.
The amplification rate is not always visible in the management console of the platform on which you advertise or share content. That is why some manual work is sometimes required to achieve this to calculate amplification rate. You do this by counting the number of shares or reposts of a post, dividing it by the number of followers you have and then multiplying by 100.
4. Referral traffic
How much traffic to your website does your campaign bring you? You keep track of this in Google Analytics by monitoring how much referral traffic comes to the site from social media and from your campaigns. By working with UTM tags you can clearly see in analytics which campaigns and advertisements have generated the most traffic. Once users are willing to leave a social platform to view your site, you know you're doing something right.
5. CTR (Click Through Rate)
We've talked about this one before, the CTR or the Click Through Rate. How many people end up clicking on the ad or content you posted? Ultimately, this leads to referral traffic (see point 4 above) and that means that users appreciate your content or ad.
The CTR also says something about how efficiently you have organized your campaign. A campaign with a lot of reach but few clicks is still not a success. Each platform tracks the CTR for you and by comparing your CTR with industry averages you know whether you are performing above or below par.
6. Bounce rate
The bounce rate is the percentage of users who immediately leave the website after visiting your landing page or content. The lower the number, the more visitors will take the time to click through and look further on your site. If your bounce rate is low among the visitors you bring in via social media, then you know you've got something. High bounce rates may indicate that users didn't quite find what they were looking for and may even be disappointed with what they encountered...
Here too, it is important to work with UTM tags because you can then make nice comparisons in Google Analytics between visitors via social platforms and 'regular' visitors.
7. Conversions
By setting up your analytics properly, you ultimately measure the holy grail of your campaign or content strategy: more conversions. This could be sales, but also subscriptions to a newsletter. Once again, with the correct setup of Google Analytics, you can see exactly which content has earned you how many Euros.