Tracking your ad’s performance is one of the most important aspects of an ad campaign. Social media ad campaigns can seem to be very complicated with so many different numbers to examine and translate into success rates. Making the perfect ad can be more difficult than it seems, especially with so many different guidelines and algorithms to follow. While this is aspect of making a great social media ad can be difficult to keep track of, what about actually tracking your ad? There’s so many different meanings to certain analytics associated with social media advertising that translating your success can seem nearly as difficult as creating ads. Different words have meanings for so many different platforms, and we’re here to explain them to you. Here’s the most important analytic details to keep in mind when making sure your business isn’t losing money with social media advertising, while making sure your ads are meshing well with the constant changes being implemented over so many different platforms.
Reach
This is one of the first, and broader, areas to observe when measuring how your ad is being viewed. Reach defines the audience of who is seeing your ad content. On Facebook, this is measured typically before your ad is deployed, making sure that your target audience is not too narrow or broad. The reach meter, as shown here, tells you how many people could possibly see your ad and helps to make sure that the keywords and zip codes that you use aren’t too limiting or too unfocused for the content that you’re sharing. Having a reach in the green section of the meter is the goal when targeting an ad, but that projected reach is often higher than the true reach the ad gets. True reach can be determined in two ways depending on how you have been deploying ads and content. There’s organic reach and paid reach. In this area of tracking, you can see the difference between the number of people seeing your paid ad campaigns or your organic posts, making it easier to distinguish which forms of ads (like video, images, text, audio, etc.) work best for you.
Impressions
Impressions are even more important to track when considering the success of your ad campaign. Impressions are the standard way to measure delivery in digital ads. Facebook counts viewed impressions by the moment an ad enters the screen of a desktop browser or mobile app. The reasons to measure impressions are extremely important when translating just how well each ad is doing, especially in terms of budget spending. The reasons to measure impressions are geared toward measuring value, consistency, and fair pricing. Impressions ultimately determine the price of your ads. If you set a budget for $10 on a Facebook ad, the $10 will be distributed evenly to maximize your budget through your target market. Facebook does not charge for ad displays that have not been viewed, therefore, they can ensure that advertisers are charged a fair price for each ad deployed without wasting money.
Clicks
Finally, the next step to getting new customers: link clicks. While there are different types of link clicks, the overall definition of link click measurement is how many people actually clicked on your ad. In social media advertising, this is the way to get viewers to a landing page in hopes of getting an action, like signing up for an email list, making a sale, attending an event, etc. When measuring, total link clicks means how many people, regardless of if it was a duplicate click from the same person or not, clicked on your ad. Unique link clicks refer to each individual who clicked on your ad with no duplicates counted. Facebook, in particular, will measure how much each click costed (PPC rate), allowing you to see if your money is being spent wisely or if your ad campaign is really worth it. Paying $2 a click can be a hefty price if no one acts on your product.
New and changing guidelines in social media advertising can make it difficult to produce engaging content, especially successful content, and tracking the performance of your content can prove to be even more difficult.
At BG Digital Group, we understand not only what it takes to make an ad successful, but also how to take the performance of your social media ad campaigns and translate them into direction and success numbers for the future. We will be with you every step of the way throughout your social advertising campaigns, driven to continue growth and success in every new campaign you start. Like any other type of advertising, we know you want your social media ad campaign to be worth it. Who wants to lose money? Not us and certainly not you.
