Let’s Talk Metrics – Engagement vs Conversions

Let’s talk about engagement vs. conversions in social media. In this crazy, digital world, it can be hard to tell what’s important when it comes to measuring the success of your marketing efforts. When setting up your social media strategy it’s crucial to have a goal in mind, but what should that goal be? Many people argue that engagement is the king of content marketing, while others argue that a successful campaign is measured by the return on investment (ROI).

The truth: conversion metrics are the name of the game.

Is that the answer you were expecting? These days, while scrolling through your feed you’ll hear talk of “engagement,” “the algorithm,” and “going viral” but what does that mean for your business? 

Engagement

Engagement metrics in social media are likes, comments, shares, and link clicks. While these metrics are important to track and incorporate into your social strategy, they often don’t equate to sales. Basically, your audience can engage with your brand and never purchase something from it. Engagement is great for brand awareness, exposure, and keeping your customers engaged with your business, but if you’re not making any sales, there won’t be much of a business to engage with 🤷‍♀️.

Conversions

If you haven’t incorporated paid social into your marketing efforts yet, you definitely need to think about doing so.

Old-school marketing was like shouting into the void, hoping that you reach your demographic. Now, with social media marketing, you can target your current audience, a lookalike audience, and even an audience or demographic that you’ve been hoping to experiment with! All it takes is a handful of calculated clicks (be sure to leave those to the professionals– you’ll thank us later). Facebook and Instagram target real customers with buying potential and track website traffic, clicks, purchases, and more. 

When you find your target audiences, the next steps are writing compelling ad copy, creative and implementing the appropriate analytics codes to make sure that each click and conversion is tracked. With social, you can track down to the post level for people who took action on your site. Examples include: filling out a lead generation form on your website, purchasing a product, subscribing to a newsletter, and downloading a PDF. These actions are all called “conversions” in Facebook Ads Manager, but obviously have different levels of intent. Therefore, you should prioritize the ones you want the most and place the most budget toward those objectives.

Unlike a lot of agencies out there, we believe in manual campaign optimization to your ad strategy. A lot of marketers like to “set it and forget it,” but at Matchstick Social, we believe it’s important to find what’s performing well and what’s not (and trim the latter) throughout the lifespan of the campaign, leaving you with the most budget to spend on a successful campaign and growth month-over-month and year-over-year.

So let’s get started! Harness the power of social advertising for your business with Matchstick Social. Give us a call at (843) 631-6504 and we can discuss your marketing goals and needs. No time to chat? Shoot over an email and we’ll find a time to connect.