28. March 2024

How to Win at Social Media, Step 4: Track Key Social Media KPIs

Social Media KPIs

This is the final part of a 4 series on building a winning social media strategy. Step 1, looked at the newest social media trends. While Step 2 provided an overview of tailoring social media strategies towards target audiences. Step 3 examined the best practice of social media marketing campaigns and how you can test and learn from them. Finally, this last step of this series considers the key social media KPIs which are important at each stage of the customer journey.

What Are Social Media KPIs?

A KPI is a Key Performance Indicator. It is a measurable value, which demonstrates how effectively a business is achieving its strategic goals.

Social media KPIs are metrics that you should track against your social media marketing goals. These measurable values can indicate the strength of your social media performance. For example, if you want to grow a large fan base, track your follower growth closely. Then you can run a lookalike campaign to get more, similar followers. 

To measure the success of this campaign, you need to see how many followers you gained from clicks on your campaign material. 

Your KPIs should be connected to your marketing goals, which in turn connects to the customer journey.

Why Match Social Media KPIs To The Customer Journey?

Firstly, depending on the stage of the customer journey, it is important to pay attention to different marketing KPIs. Moreover, each KPI can quantify the volume of consumers at a specific customer stage. Knowing the conversion from the customer journey KPIs helps you in two ways.

  1. It allows you to pinpoint exactly which stage slows you down.
  2. It allows you to understand how customers are moving down the purchase funnel through social media.

Customer Journey KPIs in the Awareness Stage

In most cases, the awareness stage is where your potential customer recognizes a specific problem/need. Individuals then research information as they seek answers to their questions. 

For brands, of course, it is important to be highly visible to customers in this stage. Social Media KPIs that help you track your visibility are as follows: 

  1. Impressions
  2. Reach
  3. Cost per one thousand impressions (CPM).

Impressions
Impressions evaluate the number of times your post was visible in someone’s feed. It is a figure that includes duplicates. For instance, if one person sees your content three times, it counts as three impressions. This is a great metric to track and ensure higher rates of content delivery. 

Impressions are great when launching a brand, rebranding, or trying to become visible to newer and larger target groups.

Reach
Reach considers how many people have seen your post since it went live. This metric can alter depending on when your audience is online and how engaging your content is. Reach creates an understanding of what your audience finds interesting or valuable. It can be calculated as follows:

Reach Calculation
Reach Calculation Formula

Unlike impressions, Reach is typically an unduplicated figure. Thus, one person seeing your ad three times would count as one person reached. For example, an Instagram video having a high reach can result in increased visibility and this can create increased brand awareness.

CPM
CPM considers the amount that is paid every time 1,000 people scroll past your sponsored social media ad. This social media KPI only considers impressions, it thus measures the visibility of your ad. It can be calculated using the following formula:

CPM Formula
CPM Formula

In general, CPM alone is not a great indicator of campaign success. Of course, you want to keep costs efficient. However, a lower CPM doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good indicator, it could also indicate poor traffic quality. It is important as a brand to analyze past advertising data and benchmark its results, in order to evaluate the impact of CPMs on your ROI (Return of Investment).

Customer Journey KPIs For Stage 2: Consideration

The second stage is Consideration. This stage implies that consumers analyze and compare existing options. This means they need to actually have access to information about your product. More than being aware of your brand, they need to go to your website to read more or compare your product to a competitor’s on eCommerce platforms, etc. Thus, important social media KPIs for your brand to consider are as follows:

  • Click-through-rate (CTR)
  • Engagement rate 
  • Cost-per-click (CPC).

Engagement Rate
Engagement rate shows how many individuals are interacting with your brand through comments, likes, mentions, and shares. It provides a more measurable assessment of the quality of your social media content. Engagement rate can be calculated as follows:

Engagement Rate Formula
Engagement Rate Formula

For example, if you as a brand have 100,000 followers on Instagram, but there are no comments, only a few likes and potentially one share. That would result in a low engagement rate, this could mean that there is a mismatch between your content and your audience. 

CTR
CTR is a percentage that illustrates the number of people who viewed your post and clicked on the CTA (Call-to-Action) button. It thus indicates what works and doesn’t work while trying to reach your target audience. The following formula can be used to calculate CTR:

CTR Formula
CTR Formula

CTR is a good indicator of interest in the product or message. This means potential customers are taking the next step to learn more about you/consider your offering.

CPC
CPC or (Cost per Click) is the ad budget spent per individual click on your sponsored social media posts. Unlike CPM, you don’t pay for impressions here. You only pay when users click on the link in your ad. This is a customer journey KPI that can tell you if your spends are efficient for the consideration stage. CPC can be calculated as follows:

CPC Formula
CPC Formula

In general, having a low CPC in marketing is beneficial, as it allows more clicks for your budget, this, in turn, means higher potential leads. Moreover, it also allows high ROI, as you can maximize conversion for your ad spend.

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Key Social Media KPIs For Stage 3 in The Customer Journey

The third stage in the customer journey, which is Decision, is a critical phase. This is when the potential customer is ready to select from the considered options and conduct a purchase. KPIs in this stage reflect how effectively you convert visitors into customers. Relevant KPIs are as follows: 

  • Conversion rate 
  • Bounce rate 
  • Cost-per-click (CPC)

Conversion Rate
Conversion rate is the ratio of visitors who take an action on a page. This provides you with an overview of how well you are converting visitors into customers. Remember: you can define a conversion based on what you want to accomplish. For example, somebody going from Facebook to your website clicking on an ad can already be considered a conversion. Whereas for social eCommerce, only a completed purchase may count as a conversion.

Conversion Rate Formula
Conversion Rate Formula

For instance, let’s say a user purchases your product on Instagram through its shoppable posts function. It thus is generating sales and converting the browser into a customer. Furthermore, if the conversion rate is high, it means that the offer was relevant to the audience you targeted in your campaign.

Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is a percentage that shows the visitors who clicked on a link, however, who did not take an action upon it. It allows you to measure your social media traffic vs. ROI against other sources of traffic. 

Bounce Rate Formula
Bounce Rate Formula

For instance, you can measure traffic from a Facebook post vs. traffic from an organic Google Ads post. Hence, if the Facebook bounce rate is lower than Google, this illustrates that your social media campaigns are better targeted than organic ads. 

Customer Journey KPIs For Stage 4: Retention

Retention is the fourth and most important phase in the customer journey. Meeting or exceeding customer expectations is the key to customer retention. Following up with your client at this level is extremely important as you need to determine how well they liked your product. As a result, you need ways to measure customers’ depth of engagement with your brand in order to be able to predict retention. Some metrics that are good indicators are as follows:

  • Customer satisfaction
  • Customer loyalty
  • Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Customer Satisfaction
In terms of customer experience, customer satisfaction (CSAT) is a valuable metric. It helps determine what customers think of your products and services. The greater the satisfaction, the more likely they are to be repeat customers, generating higher LTV (lifetime value).

Customer Satisfaction Formula
Customer Satisfaction Formula

Some of the most effective methods of collecting customer satisfaction data include Customer Satisfaction Scores, Online, Surveys, Social Media, Live Chats, SMS, etc…

Customer Loyalty
Customer loyalty refers to a positive, long-lasting relationship between a business and its customers. It keeps customers coming back to your business and leads them to choose your company over that of a competitor.

Therefore, loyal customers are people who like and trust the brand. There isn’t one clear way to measure loyalty. A few traffic analytics or domain analytics tools can give you an indication.

Or through your own analytics setup, you can look at how many websites within your category a customer may visit within a given period. Looking at many similar websites may mean they are comparison shopping and have not yet developed a long-term bond with your brand.

NPS
Known as NPS, or Net Promoter Score, the Net Promoter Score provides information about company customer satisfaction. NPS measures customer loyalty by assessing how likely they are to repurchase and recommend your brand to their network. Calculating the NPS score is easy.

Ask your customers how likely they are to buy again or recommend you to others. You can calculate your NPS score using a scale of 1-10. Add the percentage of respondents who are “promoters” (10-9) and subtract the percentage of respondents who are “detractors” (0-6) to get the score.

Stage 5: Advocacy

Advocacy is the final and hardest stage of the customer journey. At this point, the customer becomes an active promoter of the brand. Thus, NPS is also a good fit for measuring advocacy. Advocacy leads to your brand being highly credible. Thus, also generating the most powerful marketing tool any company can ever have – word of mouth. The most crucial KPI in this process is referrals.

Referrals
In the majority of cases, referrals are an exceptionally effective way for companies to acquire new customers. An example of referral marketing would be offering rewards to existing customers to recommend their friends, family, clients, and associates to a company. In most cases, referrals are the fastest and most cost-effective way to generate new business. 

Referrals Formula
Referrals Formula

There are various tools or referral programs that can be used to track the number of sales referred through your referral program. For example, you could create promo codes for referrals or provide trackable links to existing customers.

Summary

It’s important to track social media KPIs so that you can measure performance. By using customer journey KPIs, you can actually understand how much social media is impacting your bottom line. Additionally, tracking Customer Journey KPIs allows you to understand the stage in which social is most effective. Identifying areas where social media is not leading to conversion can also help you modify your strategy accordingly. 

What To Do Next

Want to enhance your Social Media Strategy? Talk to us: moin@watersky.digital