By Katy Howell | August 12, 2021
With so many metrics constantly popping up, the world of social media can be confusing. What should you be tracking? What’s important for your business goals?
We’ll take you through the various metrics that every company or brand should be looking at, so you can stay on top of your KPIs. Note that the names of the metrics can be different from one channel to another.
Each social media platform uses analytics. What metrics to track depends on what social media goals are. You need the right metrics to determine if your social strategy is successful or not. Let’s take a deeper look:
Engagement: Likes, comments and shares
Engagement rate – the number of engagements divided by impressions or reach. This is a metric that shows how your content is resonating with the audience you target. That can be determined by the number of likes or reactions, comments, clicks, and shares your ads are generating. A high engagement rate is an indicator for a responsive audience, meaning that your ads stand out and they’re interesting and appealing.
Awareness: Impressions & reach
Impressions and reach are important metrics to track, especially if your objective for social is to increase brand awareness. Impressions are how many times a post appears on someone’s timeline, and reach is the potential unique viewers a post could have.
While impressions are a great indicator of the potential your ads have for visibility on social, it’s still important to look at other metrics to boost the results further. If you have multiple goals, for instance – increasing brand awareness and educating your audience, you’ll need to look for a combination of both impressions and engagement. For example, if a post has a high number of impressions but low engagement, it likely means your post wasn’t appealing to your audience, and therefore did not encourage them to act after seeing it in their feed.
ROI: Referrals & conversions
Referrals give you information on how a user lands on your website. In web analytics, you’ll see them broken down into sources, where social or paid social is usually the source/medium you’ll be monitoring, and then it’s broken down by platform.
Conversions mean that someone has purchased something from your site. Social conversions are when a user visits any of your social media channels and then purchase something in that same visit.
Together with referrals and conversions, another important metric is the click-through rate (CTR). Calculated when you divide the number of clicks your content generates by the number of impressions this piece of content gets. A high CTR means that your ads are effective and resonate well with your target audience. Note that CTRs also can differ across industries and networks. The best approach is to research industry benchmarks beforehand and then monitor your ads and optimise accordingly.
Choosing the right social media metrics is essential because they can determine whether your campaign is hitting the mark or not, which ultimately can have an impact on your overall business.
What social metrics do you consider most important to your strategy? How have you tracked them? Don’t get lost. Work with an experienced partner – like us! Get in touch today!