By Sam Oliver & Aron Jheeta
Not sure of your CTR from your CPC?
Unclear of the difference between reach and impressions?
Weâve all been there!
Social media is confusing enough without having 6383849 acronyms and terms to remember.
If youâre new to social – or if youâre looking to increase your businessâ presence on the platforms – this newsletter is for you.
Weâve broken down the key metrics you need to know across both organic and paid.
The sections below are split into beginner, intermediate and advanced – which depend on your level of experience.
Letâs dive straight inâŠ
Beginner
Reach
This metric, used across both organic and paid content, is a measure of the number of unique people who have seen your content.
This can help you understand how many people your messaging has reached and gauge potential audience size.
Not to be confused withâŠ
Impressions
Measures the total number of times your content has been displayed, regardless of whether users clicked on it.
Impressions can include multiple views by the same person.
It also includes every single time a piece of content is served on a userâs feed.
For example, say an organic brand post is the fifth post on your feed as you start to scroll through Instagram.
If you only make it to the fourth post and then leave the app, the brand will still count this as an impression on their post. You were served the content, but didnât see it or engage with it.
Put simply, reach are the unique pairs of eyes that have seen your content.
Impressions are the total number of times your content has been served.
Video view
This is where things get a little tricky, as each platform has a slightly different definition of what counts as a viewâŠ
YouTube: At 30 seconds of viewing time
Facebook: Since March this year, a Reel view is at least one millisecond of viewing time. For videos posted prior to March, itâs three seconds. This includes replays.
Instagram: IG video plays are counted as views and it uses the same rule as Facebook (one millisecond or more). This is also the case in Metaâs ads manager – although the ads manager metric doesnât include replays.
TikTok: A view counts the very second your content starts to play.
Pinterest: When a video is watched for at least two seconds, with at least 50% of the video being visible.
Snapchat: At at least two seconds of watch time – or beforehand if a user swipes up.
X/Twitter: When a video is watched in 50% view on the timeline for two seconds or more.
Intermediate
CTR (clickthrough rate)
Number of clicks / number of impressions = CTR%
The above calculation, worked out as a percentage, is used to determine the CTR of a post. It measures how often people clicked on an ad compared to the amount of times it was served.
This is a crucial metric for tracking traffic ads, along withâŠ
CPC (cost per click)
Ad spend / total ad clicks = CPC%
This metric helps you work out how cost-effective your ad campaigns have been – and if youâve got good bang for your buck.
There are loads of free resources you can use to benchmark yourself against others in your industry. Wordstream and Brafton are good for this.
View-through rate
Views to 100%/Impressions = VTR%
View-through rate is calculated by dividing the amount of views to 100% by impressions.
Itâs a metric that gives you great insight as to how engaging your video content is from beginning to end. Whether youâre âThe Dog & Duckâ or MrBeast, not everyone that watches your video content will watch it all the way through to the end. Whilst it would be great if they did, this is just the nature of social media content.
The nifty part is that social platforms also measure views to 25%, 50% and 75% of your video content. By comparing the VTR of each of these benchmarks, you are able to see where your audience decides to stop watching.
Now, go back to the video in question. You can assess messaging at each of these stages, and create new versions to test with alternative messaging at the drop-off points. When it comes to planning content in the future, understanding what does and doesnât work is key to ensure consistent growth.
Advanced
Cost-per-lead/cost-per-sale
Amount spent / leads or sales = cost-per-lead or sale
By dividing the amount of leads or sales by the total amount youâve spent, you can work how how much the average sale or lead costs.
When it comes to sales, optimising your strategy to ensure your return on ad spend (ROAS) continually grows is key to ensuring youâre getting the maximum amount of value from your social campaigns.
Whatâs important when calculating ROAS is the amount of revenue your sales drive. Dividing this figure by the amount of sales gives you an average order value. If your cost-per-sale is higher than your average order value, you know youâre doing something wrong!
Putting a value on leads is a lot more difficult. Often for B2B purchases, getting leads into the pipeline is the only way to sell products and services, as transaction values tend to be a lot more – meaning a longer sales process.
If you use a CRM system, you should have great understanding of the amount of leads needed to drive a sale – helping you to quantify whether the lead youâve just spent hundreds of pounds on is worth it or whether your CPL needs to decrease.
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
Cost of ad spend, content creation, marketing tools etc / number of new customers = customer acquisition cost
Working out the amount of money you need to spend to grow your customer base is vital to understanding whether your marketing efforts are profitable or a money-drain. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is calculated by costing your ad spend, content creation budget, marketing tools and other expenses (depending on how granular you want to get) and dividing it by the number of new customers youâve gained.
There are a few ways to supercharge this metric:
- Calculating CAC per channel. If your business is across multiple social media channels, assessing the differences in CAC across each of them helps to show you where to prioritise budget. For example, if your TikTok strategy is delivering high volume, but youâre spending too much time creating content – it may not be as profitable as you think. You could post twice a week instead of every day for the same return – imagine what you can do with that extra time?!
- Periodical CAC. Keep track of your CAC annually, quarterly and monthly. You will likely see variance when doing this, which helps you prioritise the times of the year you should be more aggressive with your budget, compared to times where it might be worth scaling back. Assess how these stack up year-on-year to see whether your business is growing, and what factors of change may have effected this.
Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)
Customer Value * Average Customer Lifespan = Customer Lifetime Value
OR
Average order value * average number of purchases = Customer Lifetime Value
Lifetime value is an essential metric to calculate whether the efforts youâre making to gain new customers are worth it. Your LTV ideally should be around ÂŒ of your CAC, the two metrics dovetail incredibly nicely.
Calculating these historically helps you to plan what increasing your customer base might give you in the future, helping you to plan budgets effectively.
If you spot that customers are typically buying once or twice, before becoming inactive, youâll see that more should be done to market to your existing customer base – be it through re-marketing or email campaigns. Increasing the amount of times your customers purchase your products ensures a growing base of revenue for your business, vital in consistent gains.
Should customers purchase frequently with you, youâll know you should prioritise growing your customer base, as this will increase the number of products your business sells, therefore increasing your revenue and profit.
Thatâs a whistle-stop tour of just some of the social media metrics you need to know.
Thereâs loads more where that came from!
Weâll be releasing part two over the next few weeks so make sure you keep an eye out.
If youâve found this helpful, make sure you let us know by reaching out via the social links below.
Speak soon,
Sam & Aron
Sam Oliver Social 