What Social Media Marketing KPIs Should You Be Measuring?

Social media marketing is here to stay. The majority of digital marketing managers and directors plan to increase their digital marketing budgets in the coming year.

Whether you are working with a social media marketing agency or you have your own in-house digital marketing team, it’s always essential to ensure that the correct key performance indicators are measured (KPIs). This is the only way to see if your ads are driving results you need.

So, which social media marketing KPIs should you be measuring on a regular basis to ensure your campaign is on the right track?

Social Media Marketing KPIs

1. Content Quality

 Quality Score

If you are advertising on Facebook and Instagram, you will notice a metric called Ad Relevance. This is also known as your ad quality score:

• This is Facebook’s way of telling you if your ad is relevant to the audience you are targeting. The less relevant your ad, the higher your cost per click (CPC) and cost per mile (CPM).

Facebook provides you with a number out of 10. Even though there is no set benchmark when it comes to a low-quality score, we advise you try and improve all ads that have an ad score of 6 or lower:

• A higher ad score indicates that your ad is relevant to the people receiving it. This type of score also results in a much lower CPC and CPM.

Likes vs Shares

Another way to determine if your ad is good quality or not is to look at the number of engagements

However, one metric by itself is usually a poor indicator of your ad’s efficiency. We recommend comparing two metrics namely likes and shares:

• It’s easy to get likes on a post, however, to make someone feel like sharing the ad is of much higher value as that person is not only approving what you have to say as a brand but also feels like sharing it with the world.
• Aim for a 2:1 or 3:1 ratio between likes and shares. If you had 50 people like your ad, ideally you want to have 50% of them share the ad as well.

2. Bottom Line Metrics

When we talk about bottom line metrics, we refer to metrics that are actually going to help you benefit your business financially:

• Too many marketing agencies are fixated on vanity metrics such as likes, comments, shares, reach and overall engagement.

Yes, it’s great to have people talk about the brand and it’s awesome to know that people are seeing your advertisements, but is it really what’s going to bring in the money? Sales should always be your main KPI as it’s the only way you are going to keep the lights on at the end of the day.

Facebook and other social media platforms fortunately allow us to track leads, conversions and actual sales on your website.

Leads

A lead is someone who might be interested in your specific product or service but might need some more convincing before actually becoming a customer.

If your sales cycle is a little complicated then ensuring that you focus on generating leads from your social media ads is not a bad idea.

Facebook allows you to run lead generation ads and the more leads you can generate the higher the probability of increased sales.

Alternatively, by having the Facebook pixel installed on your website the platform allows you to determine how many leads you’ve generated from your Facebook ads.

At the end of each month you can determine your lead costs by dividing your overall spend by the number of leads generated. This will help you clearly understand what you are paying per lead on the specific platform.

Purchases and Conversions

Lastly, as mentioned before, sales should always be your main focus. In order to determine which ads are driving sales you can install the Facebook pixel on your thank you page (the success page a visitor lands on after making a purchase).

The pixel will fire once a customer lands on the page and this helps identify a successful purchase.

Similar to leads ads you can calculate what it costs to acquire a new customer. Ideally your main KPI should then be to lower your cost per acquisition over time.

If you are serious about upskilling yourself or your team in the field of social media marketing, then make sure to look at our social media marketing course. This certificate will enable you to:

• Grow your brand strategically on any social channel;
• Increase customer engagement; and
• Correctly target those who matter most.

Get in touch with the Digital School of Marketing

The Social Media Marketing Certificate is conducted online over a 12-week period and is considered to be the benchmark in social media marketing in South Africa. For more information and to register, follow this link.