Never feel stupid in a social media meeting again
Just because you don’t understand it, doesn’t mean you can’t understand it.
How to understand social media metrics and results
Have you ever sat in a boardroom as your social media team/agency shares an update, and you're thinking to yourself...
"WTF? I have no ducking idea what you're talking about."
Well, I’m here to tell you:
You're not alone.
It doesn’t have to be this complicated.
There is a mindset and set of metrics that will ensure you never feel dazed and confused again.
And I’m going to share them with you.
But first I have to ask, who the f decided every leader or marketer must suddenly know everything there is to know about the niche of social media marketing; every buzzword, every acronym, and all the latest jargon? We don't live in the Matrix! We can't stick a giant rod in our neck and instantly download Neo-level social media skills.
This belief is unfair, unfounded and it’s time to let it go.
You don’t need to know the meaning of every new social term or tech jargon to understand what’s important. If you follow this simple three-step framework and focus on just a few key metrics that matter, you can take back control. You can run your business again with confidence and clarity.
STEP ONE: MAKE YOUR GOALS THE MEASURE OF SUCCESS.
How do you know if your social activity is successful if you don't know what success looks like?
I know how these meetings go. You get stuck in analysis paralysis. The fastest way to get clarity is to get clear on what you want to achieve and make your objectives the only measure of success that matters. I’m talking about your big picture marketing and business goals. Do you want to grow sales by 10%, get 50,000 new subscribers, drive brand awareness? Get clear on your marketing objectives (the reason you’re doing social in the first place), make sure your social team or agency are clear on your goals, then design every meeting, every conversation and every presentation around your objectives such as:
Brand Awareness
Brand Engagement
Lead Acquisition
Sales
It helps to remember social media is no different from any other channel in your marketing mix and should be measured against the same key success indicators. It's time for less jargon, more action.
STEP TWO: CONTEXT IS KING. ALWAYS WORK WITH A BENCHMARK.
Only last week, I had a friend ask for my help deciphering a report his digital agency had shared with him. As he slid a single piece of paper across the table with two large numbers on it, he looked up and asked: "Is this good?".
To which I answered, "Who knows?"
Good in relation to what?
Numbers in isolation are useless. Social media numbers in isolation can be dangerous. Because it's surprisingly easy to find awe-inspiring numbers that confuse unsuspecting decision-makers. So the next time you look at any social media results, make sure you have benchmarks (and you can ask your team/agency to only present results with your benchmarks). I recommend you look at:
Social media performance analysis requires context
Where you've been. Always look at your numbers relative to the last month and year. It's easy enough for your team/agency to present current results against where you were in the previous period. The power is in the pattern.
Where you want to go. The goals or KPIs you've set - with your goals in mind. Please know you don't need a KPI for every single social metric, just the ones that matter.
Industry benchmark. You must have a sense of your performance relative to your industry and comp set. The averages or best practice results for the market give you a goal post. They tell you where you should and could be. There are many fantastic, and free reports online will tell you the average for your industry. I’ve added a few of my favourites in the cheat sheet download below.
STEP THREE: KNOW THE METRICS THAT MATTER.
All metrics are not created equally. Instead of trying to understand the hundreds of social metrics available to you - focus on the ones that matter. That tells the story you need to understand. There are a few metrics that quickly reveal what's happening relative to your marketing objectives. If you know these, you’ll have a measure of what’s going on and the questions you need to ask.
The metrics to know if you’re building brand awareness
Social media is an excellent tool for building brand awareness. To measure how effectively you're building brand awareness, look at:
REACH: Reach tells you how many people actually saw and interacted with your content. There is no magic reach number to aim for. Instead, look at growth over time, spend and content type.
IMPRESSIONS: Impressions tells you the number of times your content was displayed or served on a screen, no matter if they saw or it or not. Think of social impressions like public relations impressions. Be warned; this number can look ridiculously huge sometimes. So it's vital to always look at it in context to historical data. And don’t let it dazzle you. it’s potential not actual.
ENGAGEMENT RATE (one of my fav): Engagement rate tells you if your content is connecting with your audience. It’s the % of people who saw your content and found it interesting enough to follow, like, share or comment.
You can't determine if your brand awareness activity is effectiveness without understanding if your content is connecting with your audience. There's no point of reaching 5 million people if 4.8 million scrolled past your content and wouldn't touch your brand with a ten-foot pole. This is why I always look at the engagement rate when analysing brand awareness impact.
Now, average engagement rates vary by industry and platform, but generally, you're looking at about 1-3%. Anything higher, you're doing something right.
The metrics to know if you’re driving brand engagement.
The secret to social media success is – surprise surprise – being SOCIAL!
To thrive in the real world you need to be engaging and engage with people in return. It's no different in the digital world. Engagement metrics tell you if your audience/customer found your social content and conversation interesting, engaging, and meaningful.
How to measure successful social media engagement with CTR
We’ve already discussed the engagement rate, but there is another metric to look at:
CLICK-THROUGH RATE (CTR): This is one of the most important metrics to look at. CTR reveals the % of people who loved your content or ad so much, they wanted to learn more - aka click the link to visit your website. As a rule, you want this number to be 1% or higher. Subject to your industry and platform averages of course.
Ideally, your CTR improves over time as your targeting and creative get stronger.
A watch out though, ensure you're looking at CTR (link click) not CTR (all). You want to focus on the clicks that matter.
PRO TIP: Engagement isn’t just about the numbers. Your social media team should be engaging with the comments your audience shares on every post. So please jump in every now and check to make sure this happening. And, please please please check on the sentiment of the comments. This means taking time to literally read the comments. Sometimes you'll have great engagement numbers, but this is because your audience/customers aren’t happy and taking to social media in a stream of angry comments. Your team should be looking out for negative sentiment and alerting you to it, but sadly this doesn’t always happen. Comments are a highly underrated market research tool, don't waste them.
Metrics to know if you’re driving leads and sales.
Brand awareness AND engagement are all well-and-good, but if you're not driving real leads, demand and sales – then your social isn't doing its job right. You can measure demand drivers and sales through conversion metrics:
CLICK-THROUGH RATE (CTR): We’ve spoken about CTR above, so I won’t go into it again. But yes, it measures engagement and conversion.
COST-PER-CLICK (CPC): This is such an important metric and so many people undervalue it. If you take nothing else away, please take CPC seriously. CPC can tell you so many things.
Most people don't realise many social platforms operate as an auction, with a twist. You're not just bidding against competitors but you’re also bidding against yourself. The quality of your advertising strategy and your advertising creative will impact that price you pay for every click. It can seem complex at first but here are the key things your CPC can tell you if:
Your ad campaign set-up, structure, and targeting are right. If you see a high/growing CPC, get your team to relook at the setup, and ask them to make sure you’re not accidentally bidding against yourself and ultimate raising your CPC (it happens more than you think).
Your ad and/or landing page (yes landing page) creative is good or crap. Big social platforms like Facebook care about what happens before and after the click. A bad user experience is bad for their business, so your creative matters. A high CPC can mean either your ad, your offer or landing page needs work.
You're investing in the right/wrong digital channel based on ROI. You need to regularly check performance and investment across all digital channels. Are you getting a good CPC relative to other digital channels?
Cost per click is one of the most important social media metrics
It’s important to step back and make sure you're putting the right money in the right channels. Do keep in mind, the quality of the click varies by platform. The average CPC on LinkedIn is different to the CPC on YouTube, display, search… you get the drift. But the quality of a LinkedIn ad is generally higher. So take the time to measure price and quality holistically across all digital marketing.
CONVERSION RATE: Conversion rate tells you if you're attracting the right customers to your site at the right volume - and getting them to take the right action. It indicates if your social media marketing efforts are getting results and contributing to the bottom line. Conversion rate is simply the percentage of your social traffic that took the high-value action you wanted them to. Now a high-value action can be things like: subscribe, download, add to card, and buy.
Know your high-value actions and set them with your social media team/agency, so you're working to the same goals. You're generally looking for a conversion rate between 1-5%. But do your research and make sure you're across the latest industry, product and action averages.
BOUNCE RATE: Bounce rate sounds like fun but let me assure you this is one metric where you want to go down. Bounce rate tells you how many people clicked your ad but didn't like what they found, so they clicked back as quickly as possible – they bounced out. Refusing to go beyond the first landing page. This is bad. There are a lot of reasons why someone may bounce out quickly, such as:
Your landing page is crap.
You're attracting the wrong customer.
Your ad was misleading. Promised one thing only to deliver another.
Or the creative is disjointed. Humans look for visual continuity to tell them if they're on the right journey. If your ad looks completely different from your landing page – different colours, font, images, etc people will quickly retreat.
If your bounce rate is high compared to the industry, or your past campaign performance - this needs to be addressed. As I touched on above, social platforms care about the user experience. If they see a high bounce rate, they will charge you more or stop serving your ad entirely.
The game-changing questions that no one asks but you should.
Would you like to be the social media legend who asks the questions that change the game? Then listen up…
Numbers will only tell you so much of the story, there’s an element to social success that can’t be explained by data. There is a human, subjective element to social media and the only way to understand what’s working and what isn’t - is by looking at what’s working and what isn’t. These questions will help you do just that. You’ll be stunned by what they reveal:
Show me the creative for the top three paid and top three organic posts.
Show me the creative for the bottom three paid and organic posts.
Show me the outlier. Is there an ad, post, audience, or campaign that has performed unusually well or poorly? There is always an outlier.
What post got the most comments?
Show me a sample of comments for the week/month. There’s always a common topic/sentiment from followers/audience, what are our followers/audience saying?
I sincerely hope this three-step framework helps you. It’s helped me, countless times. I’ve prepared a Social Metrics that Matter Cheat Sheet you’re welcome to download, in it, you’ll also find links to some great industry benchmarks.