How Can You Track Effectiveness in Social Media?
Everything you do for your business on Facebook – whether it’s a post or an ad campaign – serves a purpose in your overall marketing strategy. And it’s important to track the impact of each of these actions to measure how many people you reached, how they engaged with your content, and what calls to action they are taking.
Fortunately, it’s becoming simpler and more informative to track effectiveness within social media. Here are a few ways you can do this right now with your Facebook marketing, as well as a few others to look forward to in the future.
Facebook Insights
The Insights on your Facebook Page tell you a lot about how well your posts are performing. The Page Summary gives you a broad overview on who follows your Page and which types of content they are most interested in. You can get an at-a-glance view of whether videos, photos or text posts perform better overall, and you can dig deeper into reach and engagement rate over the last 24 hours, the last 7 days and the last 28 days. The better informed you are about your Facebook Page audience, the better you can tailor content to fit their interests.
Facebook Ads
Facebook Ads continue to grow more robust over time. They are highly customizable, and you can create ads with a message and a format (images, videos, slideshows or custom canvases) that are ideal for your target audience.
Facebook offers a tool called a pixel to more efficiently track the actions people take after viewing your ads, across multiple devices – mobile phones, tablets, and computers. You can create a pixel on Facebook, then copy and paste the code it generates onto pages of your website where conversions occur. Conversions might include registrations, leads, adding items to a shopping cart, or checking out. If you have multiple conversions you want to track, you can also assign a specific value to each one.
Once your pixel is verified and functioning, you can create new Facebook ads that will record the actions people take after clicking on an ad. You’ll also see which device they saw the ad on, and which device they used for the conversion.
What’s Coming Up
It’s not always a straight line from a consumer seeing a Facebook ad to making a conversion on the company’s website. There are often multiple other steps in between. For example, someone planning a trip who sees an ad for a hotel may click through to the website and look through a few pages. Then she may do additional research, reading third-party online reviews and crowdsourcing advice from friends on Facebook, before feeling confident enough to go back to the hotel website to book a room. In the future, there may be a way to track this behavior across multiple devices.
Facebook is also testing ways to measure the effectiveness of online ads in boosting offline sales and in-store visits. The new tools will let stores monitor how many people visit a store location after seeing a Facebook ad campaign. You’ll be able to optimize the content, delivery, and targeting of ads based on store visits, as well as filter results for individual store locations or regions. This store visit metric will track data from people who have turned on the locations service feature on their smartphones.
Learn more about optimizing your social media marketing.