Look for These 5 Measurements to Keep Tabs on Your Social Media Marketing Campaign

• Mar 02, 2020
• Architechs for the Web
• Facebook Advertising

When launching a social media campaign, many business owners make the mistake of waiting for their sales and revenue to increase instead of fully utilizing their free reporting tools for more clues about their campaign's success. But, if the sale comes from a lead generated online, then chances are there are some helpful data trackers that will show you key factors to focus on for your next targeted campaign. From reach to influence, we will show you what this data means to you and where to find it.

The Reach of Your Campaign
When marketing professionals talk about the reach of your campaign, they are referring to the number of people that see your ad or post. In general, the more people you reach, the greater the chance of your brand becoming recognized by a larger population and your ad or post will receive engagement that may result in a conversion. Brand awareness, engagement, and ultimately conversion are three primary goals of every ad campaign.

Engaging Your Audience
What do we mean by engagement? When you see an ad or business post with something about it that entices you to click on it, write a comment on the page, retweet it, follow the brand's page, mention the brand to friends in a post that is tracked by a Social Share of Voice (SSoV) metric, or share the ad or post with others, your action is reported and measured as an engagement. Many people call this your influence factor. In other words, the larger your following and the greater your volume of audience interaction, the more social media influence you have. Bear in mind, since these actions do not necessarily lead to sales, contact with the business, or frequent site visits, the number of engagements is different than the number of conversions. 

Tracking Conversions
Conversions are those actions that directly impact your business revenue. For example, a sale on your website or an appointment made by someone who saw your social media ad is recorded as a part of your conversion metric. A high volume of conversions is the end result of a successful ad campaign. However, it is beneficial to also track the reach, engagement, most active time of day, and audience demographics to achieve more effective conversion results with the next ad.  

Learning Your Most Active Time of Day
Discovering when your targeted audience is using the selected social media platform is another way to ensure your ad campaign is popping up when more of your potential customers are more likely to see it. If, for instance, your ad is running in the morning while most of your audience is at work, then your campaign effectiveness is diminished. Facebook makes this measurement easy to track by showing you when your "friends" are online. You can then use that information to plan your ad campaign run times.

Finding Your Demographics
Audience demographics such as the location where your customers reside, the age range of your customer base, whether your customers are more likely to use a mobile device or a desktop pc, are being tracked by search engines and social media platforms. You can apply these findings to narrow your demographics for your social media ad campaign thereby placing your ad in front of the audience members who are most likely interested in your products and services. For example, a local pizza shop that does not deliver outside of a 10 mile radius would not want to pay for an ad that is being seen by people in another state. As a result, when an ad's demographics is poorly set and monitored, you could essentially be paying for something that is going to give you a poor ROI.

Get The Data You Need
Fortunately, there are two free tools every business owner should be without. Facebook Insights makes it look simple to find out more about your audience, your audience's engagement with your posts, and the breakdown of engagement for both your paid and organic posts. Google Analytics will show you where your audience is learning about your website, what they like about your site, and where you are in the search rankings for keywords. 

In conclusion, while your conversion rate may be your main focus when measuring your ROI on your current ad campaign or strategizing about your next ad, there are other factors to review that can heavily impact your ad's effectiveness. Use the free reporting tools Google and Facebook offer to determine your ad's strengths and weaknesses in the areas mentioned above. Then, for more help with your social media or search engine campaigns, contact our experienced marketing team using our online form or by calling (386) 951-4770. We get results!