3 Tips for Measuring the Success of Your Social Ads
Paid Social ads are a great way to drive sales and leads or increase brand awareness, but your efforts could be wasted if your ads aren’t performing well or if you’re inaccurately measuring your performance. Here are three tips for measuring the success of your social ads.
Related: How to Measure the Effectiveness of a Social Media Campaign
Focus on Metrics that Align With Your Goals
One of the many great things about social ads is how easy it is to track performance. Most platforms have built-in tools to manage and analyze data, but there is also a wide variety of third-party management and reporting tools to choose from. With so many metrics to track and report on, it can get difficult to determine which ones are giving you relevant insight. A key metric to pay attention to is conversion rate, which is the percentage of users that go to your website and complete a specific goal.
Another important metric is cost per action (CPA) with the action depending on your objective. For example, if you’re trying to drive sales, take a look at cost per acquisition. If you’re trying to increase brand awareness, the action may be a clicking on a link or watching a video. As you can see, these metrics change based on your objective.
Make sure to keep your goals in mind when choosing which metrics to report on.
Related: How to Understand Marketing Metrics That Really Matter
Compare Data to Previous Periods
Here’s where we put those metrics that I mentioned earlier to work! Comparing data week over week, month over month, and year over year can indicate trends that you can use to leverage your strategy, and growth over an extended period of time truly shows that your social ads are paying off.
Link Tracking
A UTM is a snippet of text code that you add to a URL. You can use a UTM to track various parameters in Google Analytics, like what specific ad is driving people to your website, which social network that ad was on, and what type of content drove them there. This user and website information collected by a UTM is extremely valuable in determining the effectiveness your paid social effort and your digital marketing effort as a whole.
Related: Google Analytics Campaign Tracking Guide
Wrapping Up
Paid Social is an integral part of a successful and well-rounded digital marketing strategy. Measuring ad performance is an important part of that strategy. Now that you have these three tips, you’re ready to effectively measure the success of your social ads.
