So you want to see how well your company’s social media posts and sponsored ads are performing? EXCELLENT.
Tracking how well your posts are performing is key to creating a better and more successful social media marketing strategy. However, tracking metrics is only useful if you understand what the metrics are counting, and how they are counted.
Social media has a language of its own and we’ve put together this helpful list of jargon so you can get the most out of your social media.
Audience: Your audience is simply the group of people that may see your content. Audiences are a combination of followers and anyone else who has seen or interacted with content on your page. Growing your audience is great for helping to increase brand awareness.
Engagement: Did someone click your link, like your post or comment? Anytime someone interacts with your post, it’s counted as an engagement.
User Generated Content (UGC): This is any type of content that has been posted by users (or followers) on your social media platforms. UGC can be in the form of text, photos or videos.
Call to Action (CTA): If you want your audience to book an appointment, make a purchase on your website, download your app, or a variety of other actions, you can add CTA buttons to your social media posts that help direct your audience to a website, to the app-store, or even to messenger. These clickable buttons are commonly found on the bottom of posts and often contain phrases such as “book now,” “message” or “shop now.”
Reach: There are 2 different types of reach that each serves their own purpose:
Page Reach: Shows how many people viewed all the content on your page
Post Reach: Shows how many people viewed that particular post
Reach can also be organic, which is how many people saw the post on their own (maybe they like your page or their friend shared your post), or it can be paid, which means you used sponsored ads to place it in the audience’s news feed.
Impressions: This is the number of times your content is displayed in the feed.
What’s the difference between reach and impressions? Here’s an example: if 1 person sees your post 3 times, this will be counted as 1 reach and 3 impressions.
Clicks: If someone clicks on content within your page or post, it’s counted a click. Clicks can come from photos, hashtags, likes or call to action buttons.
Click Through Rate (CTR): This metric is the percentage of time people saw your ad/post and performed a click. CTR calculations are achieved by taking the total number of clicks, dividing it by the total impression and turning it into a percent.
Let’s do one together. Say your ad had 1,400 clicks and 160,000 impressions:
1,400 clicks / 160,000 impressions = 0.00875
0.0087 x 100 = 0.87% CTR
Cost Per Click (CPC): This is the average cost for each click on your ad. CPC can depend on a variety of factors including your audience size, location of your audience, relevancy score and more.
Don’t panic, you don’t pay extra when someone clicks your ad, the cost is part of the overall budget and you can optimize ads to set a bid cap, however, a high CPC may mean you need to reevaluate your ad to lower that cost and make your dollar go further.
Relevancy Score: This is a rating from 1 to 10 that estimates how well your target audience is responding to your ad.
This score is shown after your ad receives more than 500 impressions. It is answering the question “how relevant is the ad to the people that are seeing it?” Low scores (1-4) mean that the right people are not seeing your ad whereas higher scores (7-10) means that your ad is in the right place, targeting the right people.
The higher your score, the more likely you are to see positive results from an ad campaign.
This list is by no means exhaustive; there are many more terms to add to this Social Media dictionary.
Relevancy Scores have recently been replaced with newer, more accurate and detailed metrics (find out in an upcoming blog post dedicated to the topic).
At Are You Social, our social media managers are well-versed in a variety of metrics and terms to ensure your social media marketing & advertising efforts are effective and efficient. For more information on the metrics we track and how we use them, send us a message on social media and a member of our team will be pleased to help you.
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