Social media analytics tools provide a centralized place to see data and metrics about your social media accounts. They help you track ROI and can even integrate with your website analytics.

Metrics like engagement are essential for assessing the success of your clients’ campaigns. However, several other vital indicators can give you a more comprehensive picture.

Track Engagement

Tracking engagement metrics is one of the most essential parts of any social media strategy. These include likes, reactions, and comments on posts, which can indicate how well a brand or content piece resonates with an audience.

Reach metrics are another essential metric to track. They tell you how many potential unique viewers a post has and can help you determine whether your current reach is adequate or needs to be expanded.

ROI metrics are also crucial to tracking, particularly when it comes to paid advertising. Metrics such as return on ad spend (ROAS) are a granular way to show the financial success of an individual ad or campaign and can be used to justify further ad spending or to identify campaigns that don’t have a high enough ROI.

Track Ad Spend

As businesses become more reliant on social media for their ROI, they must understand how to measure the effectiveness of their marketing efforts. This will depend on their business’s goals – for example, brand awareness may be necessary, while conversion rates are more critical to a sales-driven strategy.

The social analytics tools that offer built-in ad spend tracking are ideal for tracking these metrics. This lets you view actual versus budgeted spend at the campaign and account levels.

As a social media strategist, sharing your data with your team and stakeholders is essential. Creating a sharable glossary of social media metrics and explaining how they’re measured and why they matter helps everyone in your org be more data-driven.

Track Reach

As a top-of-funnel metric, reach is a crucial metric to monitor and continuously work towards improving. Boosting reach is a great way to increase the number of people who recognize your brand and become customers.

Reach measures how many people saw your post, whether they discovered it via paid ads, shares, or organically in their timelines. It also reveals how engaging your content is — high engagement rates tell social media algorithms that your posts are relevant and worthy of being served to non-followers.

It’s essential to keep in mind that reaching your audience requires more than just posting often. Optimizing your profile and posting content in various formats can help you grow your reach. Try testing different types of posts, such as images, videos, and even live streams.

Track Conversions

Social media marketing involves engaging people with your brand, website, eCommerce shop, and more. That’s why tracking conversions is a critical metric to monitor. It lets you know if your content and strategy is working.

While this metric may seem obvious, prioritizing and tracking is crucial. It helps you understand if your efforts lead to desired actions that raise the bottom line. Depending on your business model, that might mean website purchases for an eCommerce brand or someone subscribing to your newsletter, downloading gated content, or registering for a local event. Alternatively, it can also mean last click or direct interaction with social conversions. This refers to visitors who clicked a link on social media and then completed a goal on your site.

Track Influencers

Imagine navigating a new city without your GPS — you’ll take a longer route or miss out on important information. The same goes for monitoring social media metrics without the proper tools.

Tracking social media metrics can help you understand your brand’s performance and identify trends. Then, you can use these insights to improve your campaigns and report on them to clients. For example, tracking new newsletter signups or e-book downloads can show how influencer campaigns impact your bottom line. Similarly, analyzing adds to the cart against individual influencers can reveal who drives qualified traffic to your site. You may need to rework the content or find other influencers if they need to convert.