Imagine taking a journey without a map, not knowing what speed you are driving, and unsure whether your tank is low on fuel.
Crazy as that sounds, many novices use that approach when running social media ads for the first time. And this mistake can be costly (as some small businesses have discovered the hard way).
So before you spend a single dollar on social media advertising, get knowledgeable on what you should measure.
Here, we’ll take you through the five most fundamental metrics you need to track when running your next campaign.
1. Reach
Before you go into depth with social media metrics, you first need to know that people see your ads. And that’s where reach comes in.
Reach metrics are a simple number that will give you an at-a-glance indication that your advertising message is getting to enough people.
After all, if you are only reaching a small audience, it’s tough to understand whether or not your ad campaign is effective.
When launching Facebook or Instagram ads, go into the Facebook ads manager and look under your campaign for a heading called “reach.”
Make sure this is on your dashboard so you can monitor it daily. Any significant drops in your reach can flag up a potential problem with your campaign.
2. Click-Through Rate
Once you know your ads reach a broad audience, your next big task is to determine whether people are responsive to your ad. Are customers engaging with your message?
One way to answer that is to examine your click-through rate. This number represents the percentage of people who clicked on your ad after seeing it in their social media feed.
The higher that rate, the more successful your ad is at getting a response (though this isn’t the whole story, as you’ll see in the next section).
3. Conversion Rate
Getting an audience to click on your ad is only half the battle. If users are clicking but not taking action (whether that’s signing up to your email list or making a purchase), then you have a problem.
One way to monitor this is to examine the conversion rate of your ad. But first, you need to know what conversion means to your business.
What are you expecting your audience to do if they click on your ad? Are you expecting them to buy a product? Or enter their email address? Do they need to book a consultation call?
Determine this before trying to track your conversion rate.
Once you know why people are converting, you can use the Facebook pixel to track user behavior from when they see your ad to when they convert. That will give you the percentage of people converting.
4. Cost per Acquisition
Next, you must understand the costs of an ad campaign. The best way to do this is to figure out how much money you spend for each new conversion. That metric is your cost per acquisition or cost per conversion.
The advertising platform will monitor this for you. Your job is to experiment with your ads to see if you can reduce this number.
5. Return on Advertising Spend (RoAS)
Lastly, once you know your ad costs, it’s time to examine whether or not your ad campaign will be profitable for your business.
You do this by calculating your average revenue for each acquisition and dividing this number by the cost of that acquisition.
That will give you your return on investment (RoI) or return on ad spend (RoAS). So if you earn $2 for every new conversion, and each conversion costs you $1, you have a 2x return on your ad spend.
The higher this number is, the more profitable your campaign.
Your Next Step With Social Media Advertising
You can see why tracking metrics is essential to hit your targets with your social media advertising campaigns.
Don’t leave things to chance. Tap into the advice of experts by connecting with our marketing team today, and we can guide you on getting the most out of your ad budget.
