5 KPIs to Track to Build a Data-Driven Social Strategy
By Erin Brown
When your post receives the most amount of likes and comments that your account has ever received, it’s common to analyze the post and wonder what made it so popular. Choosing content based on data is key to having a successful social strategy.
If you’re running an account for a brand, you’ll want to report on all of the base metrics like likes, comments, shares, impressions and reach. A skilled data strategist can see what these metrics are telling us and build insights from them, but you don’t have to be a certified data scientist to tell a story with your results.
You can track key performance indicators (KIPs) that will help you identify if your blog content is being read, if your ads on social are gaining traction, and if you’re increasing brand awareness.
1. Scroll-tracking and Average Time on Page for Blogs
For a blog post, your main goal is to get your audience to read the content. In Google Analytics, you can track the pageviews and bounce rate of blog pages, but that data won’t tell you if those users actually read the article. To find out, you can implement scroll tracking across all blog pages, and use Scroll Depth Over 50% as a KPI to see how much of our content is actually being read. By creating Google Tag Manager events that have a trigger group for percent scrolled and time spent on the page, you can use this data to determine whether your blog content is resonating with the audience. If you don’t know to implement this trigger group on your site, consider closely following average time on page and aim for a time higher than 1 minute.
2. Repeated Users for Social Ads and Posts
If the goal of your social ads is to generate traffic to the website to drive revenue for your brand, then you need to be determining how many users you are getting to the site beyond sessions from social referrals. In Google Analytics, you can implement a calculated metric of Repeated Users. You can also find this number by simply subtracting your number of new users by total users. With this metric you can track how many users visited the site multiple times from paid ads or organic posts. By increasing your number of Repeated Users, you can theorize that your ads have been consistently seen by your target market.
3. CTA Engagement Rate
When you are using a social campaign to push a Call to Action, you should first list all the places where the CTA will be shown. If the CTA is in a video at the 1 minute mark, you can find out how many people saw the CTA by checking the amount of users who watched more than 1 minute. If the CTA is in a social post, and is asking users to click through to a link or follow the account, you can calculate the CTA Engagement Rate by dividing the number of link clicks or new followers by the number of impressions the post received. Calculating the engagement rate of the CTA is more valuable as an insight to you if the purpose of your campaign is have your audience take action.
4. Follower Growth Rate
Our clients often want to see the reach of their social content increase in order to retain new followers and increase account size. You can deliver on this when you track the Follower Growth Rate. The Follower Growth Rate is found by comparing the number of followers an account has period over period. If the growth rate is positive, you are successfully gaining and retaining a follower base. If the rate is negative or shows little to no fluctuation, then your account following is becoming stagnant. Even if impressions, reach, and engagement rates remain consistent, having a low Follower Growth Rate indicates that you are not increasing brand awareness.
5. Engagement Rate Broken Down by Likes, Comments, and Shares by Impressions
Your Engagement Rate looks amazing but you’re seeing low likes, comments, and shares. Why? Facebook Ads and Insights, Instagram Insights, and Twitter Analytics include 3-second video views, post clicks, and link clicks as engagements. If this isn’t the type of engagement you’re looking for, then you can break down the engagements you do want by the overall impressions the post earned. By measuring the Likes by Impressions, Comments by Impressions, and Shares by Impressions, you can track which engagement you are receiving a lot of and also see where you are in need of a content refresh. You should also calculate all of these metrics together divided by impressions to give a more accurate Engagement Rate, as it will reflect the engagements you are looking to earn.
Social media strategy is one of the most important areas of digital marketing. You can reach millions of people on platforms that they spend, on average, an hour a day. The quality of content on social media has improved greatly over the last decade, and companies have invested significantly in this content improvement. By tracking KPIs that are relevant to your brand’s social goals, you can report on how your strategy is data-driven and meeting their targets.
Erin is a Digital Analytics Strategist with VERB Interactive — a leader in digital marketing, specializing in solutions for the travel and hospitality industry. Find out more at www.verbinteractive.com.
