Measure Success for Your Paid Social Ad Campaigns: Which Metrics Matter

Are you tracking the metrics that matter when it comes to your paid ads on social media? I put together this tutorial to show you which ones to pay attention to that

Are you tracking the metrics that matter when it comes to your paid ads on social media? I put together this tutorial to show you which ones to pay attention to that will make all the difference in reaching your goals.

Check it out and share it with your team for maximum benefit!

Want to talk about custom campaigns for your news organization? Whether you’re trying to get newsletter sign-ups, new subscriptions or memberships or even trying to drive Tune-In – we have tried and true methods to make it happen. Reach out – info@socialnewsdesk.com.

Don’t have time to watch the whole thing? Fully time-coded transcript below if you’d like to skip around!

Full Transcript:

Let’s get started and jump into the presentation here, but it’s great for you to be able to take a few minutes out and learn about a couple of new things that we’re doing here, S and D, and really understand how to better measure success for your paid social campaigns.

3:25

So, for many of you out there, you probably are already SND users, but just to give you a quick update and remind you of the different tools that we offer.

3:33

We have SND dashboard, which is actually on its 10th anniversary.

3:38

And oh, we’ve been in the social business for more than 10 years, which is kind of impressive, given Facebook and Twitter and all the craziness with it, Sandy campaigns, a dashboard that basically allows you to publish, report, and display all your organic social efforts in one place. SIMD campaigns is our self-service tool for creating and making your own ads.

4:02

And today, we’re really going to be focusing on a lot of the data and insights we’ve gained from SND Ads on our campus, our managed service arm, that has automated ad technology to really produce powerful results in the advertising space for publishers across, actually four countries right now.

4:22

So we’re going to jump in and give you a couple of details about that. … SND Ads, we’ve been, it’s, been around for over a year now.

4:28

We actually are now advertising for 988 different brands across the US, Canada, and UK, and a little bit into a couple other. A little bit into Mexico also.

4:41

We manage about three point four million dollars in ad spend, and have published over almost almost 500 million ads, now, the Repressions for our ads now.

4:51

So it’s a nice scale now that we’ve been building up and working on. So I’ll give you a little bit of insights and data, and really understanding what we’ve learned over the Europe of creating these ads and working with publishers in this space, to really drive great results.

5:06

If you haven’t met me before, I, my name is Apryl

5:09

I’m the head of Innovation here at Social News Desk and I’m going to really go over a number of topics with deals, specifically, what metrics really matter when you’re looking at social ads.

5:19

I love Facebook, and I hate Facebook for many, many, many reasons, as you all know, but for one of the great things is they give us tons of data, but sometimes, it’s just overwhelming, the amount of data we get. And so let’s focus down, and really look at what metrics matter when you’re running campaigns.

5:36

We’re also going to talk about how did your metrics back up into the industry as a whole?

5:41

There’s lots of benchmarks out there, but a lot of those benchmarks are for all of Facebook or for other industries, so we’re going to look at what we’re seeing specifically in the news and media industry.

5:51

Then we’re going to give it a little look at what we’re doing with us and promotions and what’s new in that space.

5:56

So jumping in here as I mentioned, I’ve been what social news desk for almost three years now during the crazy years, that we’ve been having my hair.

6:06

It keeps growing out as much as I can get to the hairstylist. So just so you know the children and their vulgar air. But, you know, the lovely pandemic that we’re in. It’s always changing, And when you can get out, in the environment. So hopefully, open things are opening for you, and you guys have been healthy over this time.

6:23

But as we pivot here, really talk about and get down to the meat and the metrics that matter, the lowest. And most important thing that I can tell you here in this space is really, really important, to look at actionable metrics.

6:37

When we first started in social, and I started on Social probably, 15 years ago, now, that’s when we used to poke people.

6:44

I don’t know if anyone, remember, anyone remembers Poking. But that’s when I got started in this.

6:50

We really looked at likes, comments, shares and engagement, those. That was basically the metrics we had and that’s what we would focus on. And where it was all about Do we have more likes and comments and engagements? And the TV station, or newspaper across the street.

7:05

At the end of the day, that’s where we measure success.

7:07

But we’ve come a long, long way from that.

7:11

It’s really going beyond that. You can look at those metrics, like likes, comments, and shares, and that could be a good indicator, but really, those metrics can be gained. As you know, TV stations and newspapers publish things that are not local to their area. They’ll ask people to life and comment the page. Those are so susceptible to gaming, and at the end of the day, they don’t put money in the bank for you.

7:33

So it’s really important to look at metrics that matter like tune it for your TV station, downloads, subscriptions, sign-ups for your newsletter, downloads for your app. Those things are really like pivotal in what you’re looking at, So what we call really is actionable Metrics is what you’re looking for versus the vanity metrics of what we were looking at several years ago.

7:56

So looking at that, well, how do you figure out? What is that actual metric for you?

8:01

Really depends on, what is your goal, what are you trying to accomplish with social.

8:06

Be a number of different issues, or, or several initiatives that you’re doing. But when you’re running a paid ad campaign, you need to very clearly understand what the goal of that campaign.

8:15

So, I’m gonna go through some of the different goals you may have in that for newspapers or for TV stations when you’re running ads and what KPIs you should be looking at. KPIs specifically stands for Key Performance Indicators. What is that one data point, or two data points you should focus on?

8:33

So if you’re doing an app install campaign, which is Facebook, is a really great place to get results for this, because they are so low, will have the book and Instagram really dominate in the mobile space.

8:45

So, running app campaigns for that can be a really great place to get app downloads and get people to engage with that app, Especially if you’re having breaking weather situations like the tornadoes or hurricanes that have been going on. This is an older hurricane, if you remember, Laura, from a couple of a year ago now.

9:02

But when you’re doing that, when you’re looking at app installs, the number one item you should be looking at is the cost per download or install.

9:09

Um, it’s a little tricky, I will say, if you’re going to run an app campaign on Facebook, Facebook does require you have install some extra tracking information on your app to be able to track that cost per download.

9:22

But once you do that, you can actually understand how effective your ad dollars are. You can look at clicks, and you can look at the click through rate on your ads, but what you’ll find is, just because someone clicked on it doesn’t mean they took the time to download.

9:35

So what is that cost? How much are you paying per download?

9:39

Once you get past that understanding over time, what is the retention rate of those people that have actually downloaded the app?

9:45

Are they engaging with it? Still? Are they opening it up on a regular basis? And what is the rate of that?

9:50

And looking at that, those two metrics are the ones we really focus in on when we’re, when we’re looking at app installs or downloads.

9:59

Newsletter sign-ups, very similar in kind of the KPIs that we’re looking for here instead of cost per download or install, we’re looking at what’s the cost per sign up. What is the cost to get someone to actually sign up for that newsletter campaign, and take the next step with it?

10:14

You could look at engagement on it. There’s a number.

10:16

You can look at how many people click to the newsletter sign-up form at the end of the day, how much does that sign up, Cost you is really what’s important.

10:25

Then from their understanding, how much do they, how much they open your e-mail or conventionally Do they actually subscribe to your newspaper or to your digital products as a result of getting your newsletter.

10:38

The second, the second piece of this, is really important, that it kind of depends on what your goal for your newsletter is.

10:44

If your goal, at the end of the day for your newsletter, is to get subscriptions, you should really focus in on that subscription rate and understand how many people that subscribe to your newsletter actually end up buying a newspaper subscription, or membership piece from it.

10:57

That will really understand the value of your newsletters. And if you have multiple newsletters, it understanding which ones perform better and actually generate more subscriptions, will really help you long term.

11:09

Because then you can decide which ones you should spend money in effectively and promoting in the industry across the industry.

11:14

We’re getting into benchmarks here in the next section. But across the industry, we see that open rates and subscription rates can be very good for food type newsletters, like we have an example of the San Antonio News Express Newsletter. Over here, on the right business, is really effective opening, and closing, especially, as I mentioned, you know, elsewhere encoded, and things are continually changing. People really want to know about the community, what’s open, and what flows. So, those business type things.

11:42

We see the Drive really high subscription rates, and open rates, because people really care about that piece in the community. Now, this may vary for your market. But those are one of the two types that we’re seeing across the industry, that are very strong right now.

11:57

By the way, coven, as you guys make as many of you may have Kobe newsletters or pieces around that, as you probably already see interest is waning people care about covert. They care what’s going on, but there really is a fatigue around it.

12:10

So, newsletters that are associated with that, we aren’t seeing nearly as much interest. They will sign up, they do want to want the information, but they just are also just tired of it. It’s just, it’s a lot, as you guys, as everyone knows, is the human.

12:24

So we are, and we are seeing that plane the deal so if we’ve talked about subscriptions or membership sold, if that is the goal that you’re looking for here, you will really want to look at your cost per purchase or to start out with understanding how much it takes you an ad spend to get that purchase.

12:42

Now, we’ll talk about this a little bit deeper. We are in the fabulous iOS world with, if you’ve heard the fight between Facebook and Apple, It is really hard to start measuring this. And this is getting it more difficult. And then add onto that, if you’re in California, you also have to deal with C, C, CPA.

13:00

So that can make getting to this cost per purchase more difficult. But our team can work with you to really help you understand that, and what, how many ad dollars it really takes to generate a purchase.

13:11

But then beyond that, you also want to look at your retention rate.

13:14

As many of you have many newspapers have a $1 for six month sale or even or for 16 weeks or whatever the different versions of that may be. It’s really important that these people stay were detained because you aren’t making your money in the first purchase. You’re making it in the, Well, as they renew, or actually as they subscribe next year, or the year after. So looking at the retention rate is also very important to follow that through.

13:43

So, getting into two of the campaign types of goals that you might have, that are a little bit not fuzzy or but harder to put, an actual KPI to measure it around, in the hard KPI would be like, if your goal is to engage new audiences.

13:57

If that’s your goal, if you want to get brand-new people to your website, it can be a little bit harder to say, What is the KPIs I should look at?

14:04

We recommend starting with the cost per link click. How much does it cost to get that new person to your site to click on the content?

14:10

And looking at your click through rate for that You can also go a little bit deeper. How many pages did they look at? How many pages did they look at over time? Some of that can be harder to track, though and can be a little bit more difficult.

14:24

It depends on your setups and what kind of on site metrics you have.

14:28

But we do recommend starting with your cost per link click, because, again, that will tell you how much it costs to get people to initially click on that ad, and get to your site, and start consuming your content.

14:38

In this case, you want to make sure that you’re not in, These ads are not including any one that is already engaging, exclude all the people that like you on Facebook, that engage with your Facebook page, that already come to your website, that already subscribe, that already get newsletter. You should solely focused on trying to get brand new people to come in here and see, see what the cost per link click is for that.

15:02

Then the last kind of goal here we’ll talk about, and really, the KPI behind that is looking when you’re trying to drive tune in for TV.

15:10

So for this, we hear a lot of different people focused on different metrics from engagement to video views to many other different things in the space.

15:19

But what we found it SLD is that if you focus on the people reached your cost per thousand impression to reach these people, that can really give you a key indicator.

15:30

And the reason for this is, the more people that see your ad closer to the way your programming is going to air that you’re promoting, the more likely they are to remember and to watch it.

15:41

If you, if you’re just trying to get video views, a lot of times, we see people will watch it, watch the video, but then they are like, OK, I got enough information. I really don’t need to tune it.

15:52

Or engagement, that’s great, but you really don’t have anything actionable for that. Afterwards, they just engage it, begin with the, gave it a like, and moved on. But just getting that message out to as many people as possible, you are much more likely to actually get them to tune in. But the key to that is trying to keep that, that message delivered, delivering that message just close to the programming as possible. You don’t want to serve the tune in and two weeks before the program starts, because people are very unlikely to remember that, that they’re, they’re hardly ever remember something based on social and our Lego let alone a week later, so getting that programming of that message and reaching people right, at that time space from the program it gets going live is important.

16:35

So, switching on that, talking about the same things and, and, the same, what those metrics and KPIs you should focus on. Let’s really look at what that, what those KPIs look like for the industry as a whole for all of Facebook as a whole Facebook ad, Sorry, Facebook and Instagram as a whole. And also for the news media industry.

16:55

So when we’re talking about app installs, and we’re looking at this, what we see is, across all of Facebook, is, on average, it is about three dollars and 34% for a download.

17:05

So that means any type of brand, whether it’s Coca Cola, whether it’s a TV news station, anything about that we, it’s in $3.3 and 34% range.

17:16

Facebook is very powerful. A lot of people use Facebook for gaming, downloading those sort of things, and the like. So that is one of their main app ad types.

17:24

But if you look specifically a little bit lower at news media and news media because it really produces content that people care about, they actually have a much lower cost per acquisition around a dollar a year in this space.

17:36

Again, you have to install additional tracking. It’s called the Facebook SDK to be able to measure downloads. But we see really effective cost prices here. And we see this cost go even lower when there is storms in your area and really follow and get on those strong trends.

17:54

So switching back to the newsletters, as we talked about, before, we see on average, for all of Facebook, for sign-ups for this. In this area are six dollars and 64%.

18:05

But if you look specifically across the network of what we will, look the data we have here at social news as we see it on average about 85 for newsletters sign-up.

18:14

Now, this can vary a lot depending on, We hear that social news desk to work with, very broad newsletters, like general newsletters that are applicable to everyone across the country, or very, very, very niche newsletters. We have a sports betting newsletter we work on. We have a sports trading cards, card newsletter. You name it, we’ve worked with many different newsletters, but so the Christ can vary depending on how broad the interested or not.

18:40

Also on how new your publication is, if you’re a newer publication of the cost per newsletter, sign-up, can also be a little bit higher Or if you’ve actually already have a lot of newsletter sign-ups and you have a very robust audience already can get a little bit higher.

18:56

On average, I would say that we see 85% Is the average for getting that newsletter sign-ups and driving people to get your news all the daily, or a weekly basis, depending on what your newsletter services.

19:10

Subscriptions and memberships, as I mentioned before, there’s just a little bit difficult area to measure these days.

19:16

It can change a lot too.

19:17

Many papers have many different the membership model, subscription models, price, variations.

19:24

I would say, on average, we see that it’s around $74, a cost of publications we work with across all of the US and Canada. But again, if you’re having a sale offer, if this can be less, especially if you’re doing a 1 for 6, we definitely see this costs go down.

19:41

But you really need to work to make sure you have the best tracking in place to make sure that you’re capturing all this.

19:47

When you see that iOS data, we are losing about up to 50% or more of our actual purchases in this space, because people have opted out of tracking and do not want to provide that information.

20:00

So if you’re looking for that data, we do recommend taking some extra steps to fully understand that, But on average, again, for this, we see that about $74, We don’t have an average for all of Facebook, because subscriptions vary so dramatically, It’s hard to kind of compare that and really benchmark that price.

20:19

So, engaging new audiences, if you’re looking at this and you’re looking to see what your cost per click would be on this, we see that in the news media space, this is about 9%, cost per click for each click.

20:31

You may remember, the old days, you could actually get that much, much cheaper, but today, and where we are with the economy and how many ads are running on Facebook, it’s about 99% in this space.

20:41

All of Facebook averages out to about 35%, so that’s definitely an improvement over that.

20:47

This number again will fluctuate depending on who you’re trying to reach out to, how many people are in your community.

20:53

It definitely varies based on that, but it is still a really good benchmark here to look at, plus, those barinas look really good. So this would get me to click.

21:04

And then for tuning, in the tune in space, what we see on Facebook right now Facebook actually, the CPM has been increasing a good deal.

21:12

As the economy as kind of opened up.

21:15

And as I say thought to come, closing a little bit time. It’s hard to say what it is that we have seen prices increase as we as the vaccines have rolled out. So, Facebook on an average. right now, the average CPM is six dollars and 36%.

21:30

First news media, we see that 4.9%. I would say for dollars, 90% is a good look, but also note that you are trying to reach people. Just rank several hours before the show, or the day before the show. That price can increase a little bit, so it’s a good benchmark to use, but again, just note, if you’re the shorter the time frame, you’re running a little bit more. It costs. You will see there, but this is a great thing to look at.

21:56

Um, so that kind of talks about the benchmarks. and then what we’re really looking at when we talk about metrics that matter for the news industry. And really want to give you, also a highlight of what we’re doing with our SND ads tech here.

22:09

So, if you aren’t familiar, we have technology that we’ve built up over the last year that takes all the information, about the stories, that you are publishing on, your website, and on social. And it looks at different content categories. It looks like how long this story can last. It takes Google Analytics data, take signals about what people are engaged with, with social all to create really great dynamic ads in real time.

22:34

And we have a team, which is actually continually growing.

22:37

We actually have several new members that have joined it recently, that allows us to do superhuman optimization.

22:43

If I like to think of this as if he IR, if you know Tony Stark and you know the superhero world of marble. The technology we built is kind of like Tony super suit.

22:55

It really allows us to be able to build at scale and optimize them at scale. So, we’re able to find out what content is trending, create ads in real-time around that, and move Budgets. If your app newsletter is doing really well, we can move budget. So it spends more on that day. If it’s a slow news day, we can spend less than back off of that. We really can move budgets in real-time and content in real time to create the most powerful ads for your brand. You guys do the hard work every day and creating stories that people care about, and want to read and understand what’s going on in the community. And this technology can really highlight it and get it to the people, so they can understand that.

23:31

To give you a look at what that looks like, It looks very different for each person. The app, what we build is an add template, and a collection of stories that go into it.

23:40

That collection of stories will look very differently, whether who you are, depending on your interests. So, if you’re a dog lover, you would get the dog.

23:48

And that you see here, if you’re more interested in the latest going on in sports, you might get the sports for all story at the bar, and it will really vary depending on how you interact with content and what you care about.

24:02

So what we see here is this dynamic content, it just captures people’s attention and grants, really great results for the brands that we work with. And it’s much better than just boosting a post and hoping that you get that. You pick the right story to spend money on, plus expense budget, even more more evenly so that you just don’t get once by from one day to your website, and it’ll actually spread it out across the entire month or several months, depending on how long your campaign.

24:30

The newest piece of it here is we’ve actually launched a new report, and we have even more data reporting company that allows you to see all the performance of your ads in one space.

24:40

So the paid report here that you’re looking at, this, it will give you the total spend that you’re spending on a campaign.

24:47

It will break that down and tell you what your cost per lead per newsletter sign-up is, what your cost per conversion is, what your cost per click, is, all in one place, and give you a highlight of that data, And it can work across one, that account, multiple ad account, one Facebook page, multiple Facebook pages.

25:05

It breaks that up so that you can look at it by different tactics, so that you can compare all your ads at the same tactics together. And it also lets you go down to the granular level.

25:14

If you’re promoting multiple newsletters, you can see how your sports newsletter is doing compared to your food newsletter compared to your business newsletter.

25:24

And that’ll give you really great data around all of that.

25:28

So if you are a current client, let us know. We’ll make sure to walk you.

25:31

We can reach out to us, and we can walk you through the new report. Or make sure that you’re getting that.

25:36

one of the other things that I love is at the top here, you can see that you can actually customize the date range. So, you can, instead of before with our reports, that whatever date range you got, you had to, either we run the report, if you wanted to get something new, or you had to be just stuck with that. But you can customize it in a couple of clicks. You can get the new date range and customize the data to be exactly what you need to see.

25:59

So, we just made a few improvements here to really pull that out and really make it easier to digest the information, and we have even more data reported coming very shortly in this space. So we’re excited to kind of give you a little hint of what we’re starting to do here.

26:14

So, with that, I’m going to see if anyone has any questions, and if you do, you can ask them now, or in the belief in the chat box here, or you can actually e-mail info at social news desk dot com, or, or me directly at April, … Social newsdesk. Feel free to reach out to us if you have any questions about social Data Analytics, or just generally what you’re seeing in the Facebook ad space, because we’re happy to help you. I’ll give you some guidance.

26:55

So I’ll just give it another few minutes to see if anyone specifically writes any questions in the boxes here. But if not, like I said, feel free to always reach out to us after the fact. And our team is always glad to help you with any of that.

27:10

We actually new, Our whole entire team actually takes Blueprint certification from Facebook, so we tested it on a regular basis so that we understand what’s going on. We also know what all the latest and greatest funds are on the platform by Facebook likes to break things.

27:27

So if you’re seeing something weird, or you just have a question about some data and information, we’re happy to provide any guidance in that space.

27:36

I’m not saying anything in the chat boxes right now, so I’m going to actually end this. But feel free to reach out if you have more of them, or if you want more information on what we’re doing or how we can help.

27:46

I hope everyone has a great day.

27:48

Thank you

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