4 key ways to measure ROI for social media campaigns

Before any question around a campaign’s Return on Investment (ROI) can be answered, it’s imperative that all stakeholders are on the same page about the objective of the campaign. Each ad rupee spent, or creative made, has an agenda which needs to be in line with the campaign goal. For social media brand campaigns, we typically see multiple objectives such as increasing awareness, reaching out to a newer audience, earning additional reach through brand advocates, and/or increasing recall or consideration, writes Siddharth Devnani, Co-Founder and Director, SoCheers

On social media, there are a few ways in which the ROI for a campaign can be measured. One of the common fallacies we see is revenue being used the yardstick for measuring success, even if may not be the campaign's objective. While many typical objectives for brand campaigns are qualitative or subjective, we see marketeers scramble to report some handy metrics as an alternative. Let us see how the industry can do this smartly. 

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Some best practices for reporting ROI for brand campaigns on social media are as follows:

Identify and measure Key Social Actions

What is the expected action from the audience? What is the audience doing with the communication, as compared to what is expected?

Key action(s) need to be pre-defined in the planning stage. A suggestion would be to steer away from post likes and look for higher involvement actions. Some of these include retweets, shares, tags/mentions, clicks on ads, comments, video views over 5 seconds or over 20% (varying among platforms and content types). Some of these are readily accessible, while some of them might have to be derived. 

Audience Analytics

What is the size of the audience which is responding to the campaign? What is the exact percentage of people who responded to the communication versus the ones who only saw it? 

Unique engagement versus reach or unique click-through-rate (CTR) would be ideal metrics here. On social platforms where the feed algorithms decide who and how many can see your content, it is a good practice to measure the baseline performance of your content – and compare that with the relative performance of your campaign content. Another preferred practice is to understand what part of the audience reached or the users that responded form a part of the brand's target audience – this data may not be easily available, so there are tools which give some insights to make inferences. 

Conversations: What are users saying?

Throughout social media, brands get tagged in posts and tweets, brand pages get a lot of direct messages while posts on official pages get commented on or replied to. A good practice is to understand what conversation is taking place at an aggregate level. What feeling the brand communication is evoking, and at an average what is the sentiment? This can be further explored via social listening. 

Social listening is the tracking and analysing of the conversations mentioning the brand/products on social media platforms. This activity typically requires a tool which can do two things – firstly, it pulls and consolidates the conversations from the social platforms; and secondly, it provides the tools needed to make sense of the online chatter by plotting trends or providing additional analysis on all the data available. Some of the insights derived are conversation trends (what people talking about and how it is changing over time), the causality of uptick in brand mentions, and the sentiment of the chatter. Brands can then use these data points to either augment processes based on what is working or course correct if something is not. The selection of the right tool is the first important step in this – the costs and features can vary greatly since the sky is the limit with the AI & ML algorithms some of them bring on board. 

Brand Lift Studies: To what extent did the campaign drive the expected change?

Major social platforms provide brand lift studies for paid campaigns. This methodically measures the first-hand response to the campaign. The platform will pick a sample of the audience – typically those who saw the ad – for a short survey checking if they remember seeing the ad or similar questions. This turns out to be an extremely powerful tool to measure effectiveness of the campaign – from targeting, communication to creatives. This study is typically made available to bigger brands where the platforms find the spend to be considerable. 

It is up to the teams to make the most of their analytics effort. A feedback loop is necessary to ensure learnings are implemented and better metrics are tracked for checking the ROI. Finally, consensus among stakeholders – business or product teams, internal marketing, branding, advertising or social media teams, and (involved) external agencies – is essential for using these insights to make critical decisions and ensure better outcomes. 

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