Social Media Analytics & Metrics Guide To Measure Success
- Propelrr
- 20 Sep 2019
Ever heard of businessmen or owners saying, “We don’t have Facebook since our audience doesn’t use social media that much.” For a digital marketing agency like us to hear that is surprising, maybe even jaw-dropping. Why?
A digital report by Hootsuite showed there 3.484 billion out of 4.388 billion Internet users are on social media this 2019—a steady 9 percent as compared to last year’s listed users. From these numbers, about 68% are adult social media users on Facebook alone. That leaves the other 32% for children under 18. No matter how you look at it, you just can’t leave social media marketing out of your business strategy anymore.
The key to creating a successful digital marketing strategy, you need to know what works and what doesn’t. How? By tracking and maximizing the different metrics for social media.
To get you started with your social media marketing campaigns, here is a complete list of all social media analytics and metrics for success:
Social Media Awareness Metrics
Social Media Engagement Metrics
Social Media Metrics for Leads
Social Media Conversion Metrics
Keep on reading to get a better idea of these social media analytics and metrics.
Social Media Awareness Metrics
This KPI for marketing is hard to measure. Some industry experts see it as unnecessary in promoting your brand, while others see it as an essential facet of marketing to increase ROI.
1. Estimated Ad Recall Lift
This metrics basically refers to the ability of a customer to recall your brand or product. In order to get prospective customers to notice your product, it has to be promoted with a catchy tagline or logo through an ad that runs consistently.
One example of a high-impact social media marketing strategy is having popular and relevant celebrities or influencers to promote their brand. One organic and natural way is creating highly-emotional and viral content that can get people talking about your brand or product for days and even years to come.
2. Impressions
Another KPI to take note are the impressions. These are the total number of times a post appeared on someone’s timeline or how many times it has been viewed. A particular post, for instance, was viewed by one person in two or many different ways. Impressions help target a specific demographic of your followers who can be potential brand ambassadors and loyal clients or customers.
3. Reach
The reach refers to the specific number of people who saw your page, profile, and content. These people are responsible for the number of post impressions due to multiple shares.
When you go over your social media analytics, don’t skip the figures that are under impressions and reach. Both are critical marketing metrics to assess what you can do next for your business strategy. The activity of your fans or followers will enable you to tailor your content according to the numbers of reach and impressions. Analyzing them will also lead you to better engagement and better brand promotion, which then leads to possible higher sales generated.
Social Media Engagement Metrics
You can target social media engagement as a part of your performance metrics by identifying who shared your content and what type of content had the most number of shares. The former refers to the number of active users that interact with your account, i.e., likes, retweets, comments, etc. and how often they do this.
4. Post-Engagement Rate
This is the number of people who engaged with a post divided by the number of total reach or impressions. When a post has a high engagement rate, it means the post is interesting enough to capture your targeted audience’s attention. A person who engages with a post several times will be counted as one engaged user. If a user reacted to 10 posts and made two comments, for example, it will be a total of 12 engagements.
5. Page Engagement Rate
The page engagement rate refers to the number of profile visits, website clicks, number of stories created, and promotions you’ve had for the week. You can also check other KPI metrics such as the gender, age range, and top locations of your followers. Depending on which social media platform you use, you may select a time frame to view your page’s engagements in that particular period.
6. Interactions
To target meaningful interactions is one KPI in marketing that you must look into. Most of the customers online, for example, prefer businesses to be as responsive as they can be when it comes to product inquiries and customer support. The response speed is also as important as the responses themselves.
Users equate it to reliability in terms of the services you offer. Thus, a higher chance they will avail your products/services. Interactions are also one way to measure social media metrics as far as your site’s credibility is concerned.
- Shares – the number of times your post was shared
- Comments – a user’s feedback on a particular post
- Reactions – a reaction to a specific post from your follower
- Video Views – the number of times people watched your video
- Post Clicks – the number of times users clicked a post
- Link Clicks – the number of times users clicked a post
A good engagement rate will generate scores between 3.5 percent and 6 percent. By analyzing the data provided by your engagement stats, you can identify what works best for every audience in each social media platform. This has to be included in your KPI dashboard as it will help you save time in planning an effective social media marketing strategy in the long haul.
7. Follower Count
The metrics for your followers’ growth measures the number of new followers you acquired at a certain period. This will then be compared to a predetermined target to assess your success rate based on your business objectives and your competitors.
- Total Followers – the total number of followers you’ve had since day 1 of account or site creation.
- New Followers – this metrics KPI measures the number of users who recently followed you or the number of followers you gained in a certain period.
- Demographics – the demographics of users who follow your profile will allow you to recognize which social media platforms are more suitable for your branding.
- Gender – your KPI report has to include the gender most especially if the products or services you are delivering are gender-specific, i.e., bohemian-inspired earrings, leather satchels for men, etc.
- Age – you can utilize analytics data that contain the age to pinpoint what particular posts are relevant to which age bracket.
- Location (local) – for the local KPI metrics, it will include the percentage of those who live in suburban, rural, and urban areas.
- Location (international) – your KPI report will include data according to the number of users per country.
The analytics report for every social media profile will vary depending on the company size, the type of industry, and platform. Although followers’ growth doesn’t correctly add to higher sales, it is equally crucial in curating your online content based on the type of followers you have.
Social Media Metrics for Leads
One of the key metrics in social media marketing is lead generation. It works by capturing the consumers’ interest in a particular product or service to develop a sales pipeline. This involves the process of data collection such as names and contact information of prospective customers, which are contacted by the salespeople to generate orders.
8. Click-Through-Rate (CTR)
Measuring your Click-Through-Rate (CTR) is a part of marketing analytics that shows the number of times people clicked an ad after they saw it. Digital marketers use this to gauge how good the keywords are, and if the ads are performing well. You can get the CTR by getting the number of clicks divided by the number of impressions.
9. Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Ad
To run a successful PPC campaign, you will need a high click-through rate. This is because your CTR will affect your quality score and how much you will pay when someone clicks the search ad.
10. Landing Page
A landing page is, by far, the most important page on your website. By using it as one of the analytics tools, you can maximize its performance and get a spike in your CTR. Called as a “pre-sell page,” a percentage of people who arrived in this page after seeing your ad will click through the target page.
A high CTR means there is a high percentage of people who clicked your ad. A lower CTR means the ad is irrelevant; thus, lower chances of getting leads. When the CTR scores better, it also means the ad has higher chances of being shown by Bing and Google as a part of the metrics in Google Analytics, which also translates to less advertising expenses.
Social Media Conversion Metrics
Metrics for conversion in sites and pages usually follow after generating leads, converting the site visitors to leads, and eventually turning leads to customers. This will include the conversion rate, which refers to the number of visitors who took action on a page after clicking a link in your post.
11. Downloads/Installs
Your download or installation rate increases when someone visits your site and installs or downloads something from that site on that same day. It can be an e-book, whitepaper, report, or any other type of content.
12. Registrations
One way to optimize your registration conversion rates is through an enticing offer that is different from what your competitors have. Don’t settle with free consultations but give them something useful that they will keep them coming back for more.
13. Referrals
Referrals are the ways a user lands on your site. In the analytics by Google, they are categorized as sources or networks that recommended your site or page to users. The traffic for referrals are strong indicators to identify the external sources that are most valuable to your business.
14. Return of Investment (ROI)
To get a high return on investment for your marketing campaigns, you must calculate your social media campaign. Next, identify how much are the actual expenses based on the type of campaign you’re running. Lastly, what is the impact of said amount in your business profits? You can then identify through these metrics the performance of your campaign’s profitability.
The conversion rate is one of the metrics in marketing that is essential when creating a sales funnel starting from lead generation to conversion. You can get the conversion rate by following this formula:
conversions ÷ total visitors × 100% = conversion rate.
You may also look into conversion rate optimization, cost per acquisition, and e-commerce tracking, which are a part of the conversion metrics.
Key Takeaways
Your social media marketing goals will determine the set of metrics and KPIs you need to incorporate in your strategies. This is essential when realigning your business goals and processes according to your KPI reports.
- Metrics are the ones that help you determine the KPIs that you need to track in order to boost your business forward.
- You can utilize data from impressions and reach to increase brand awareness and strategize your next marketing move.
- To optimize engagement, the post engagement rate, page engagement rate, interactions, and followers count have to be a part of your KPI dashboard.
- Leads generation is critical in creating a sales funnel by means of pay-per-click ads and landing pages.
- A high conversion rate means you are successfully running your campaign ads, and they are highly relevant to users.
Need help in understanding these metrics? Shoot us a message, and we’ll help you out. Reach us through Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn.