Creating an effective social media ad isn’t easy, especially with the endless supply of content being shared every day. It’s challenging to create ads that will capture the eyes of your target audience in just a split second sometimes.
While most of the content being shared today is easily ignored, businesses can increase their clicks and engagement when they step up their game and carefully craft an ad that appeals to their audience.
Using these four key metrics to track your ad performance can not only help you save money acquiring leads, but can also assist your company in creating a solid ad from the very beginning.
Understanding the Importance of Graphic Design in Advertising
Advertising your business is crucial to its success, and more often than not, a good advertising campaign will involve graphic design. Graphics can effectively communicate what you want customers to know about your brand and its products or services.
Good design takes information such as customer demographics or preferences and creates a visual message that speaks directly to your audience. This message can be distributed in various ways, including video, animation, infographics, or more.
When the advertising campaign is all tied together under one design vision, it can reinforce your marketing strategy. This can promote brand awareness, expand your reach among potential customers, and increase your business’s bottom line.
The Importance of Great Copy
A copywriter writing an ad copy must have a clear goal right from the start. Knowing the purpose of the ad copy is the epitome of creating quality content. Without this direction, it’s impossible to grab attention.
Good copy can also encourage users to take action. Everyone writes a call-to-action, but how many of them get clicks? Great copywriting also comes in the form of a powerful headline, building a desire to see more, and caters to the target group to reach more people.
The ad copy you create becomes the digital representation of your brand. People will judge your products and services based on the copy you write about them. This is especially true for new customers and top-of-the-funnel marketing.
Utilizing a solid copywriter for your ads can differentiate between getting the metrics and results you want, and your audience scrolling past your content.
Four Social Media Ad Performance Metrics to Track
1. Cost-Per-Action (CPA)
There are three ways you can pay for your ads: cost per impression (CPM), cost per click (CPC), and cost per action (CPA).
Cost-per-action is a system in which you only pay for selected actions. For example, cost per action on Facebook includes Page likes, offer claims, mobile app installs, and link click. This is the best approach if you aim to have the audience take action beyond a click, such as filling out a form or signing up for an event.
There are two significant advantages to cost per action. First, you can drill down on and only pay for actions that are aligned with your campaign goals. Second, you can better track leads and new customers by optimizing for conversions like form fills or downloads.
2. Conversion Rate
By measuring conversions on your social ad, you can better understand the ROI of your campaign. That’s because what you’re tracking is closely linked to an action that is relevant to your goal. If your goal is webinar sign-ups, that’s what you should pay for (and track), not just the number of impressions or clicks on an ad.
Regardless of whether your conversion rate is high or low, the same research should be done into why. Knowing this metric will help you better understand how to create better ads in the future by determining what worked and what didn’t.
3. Click-Through Rate (CTR)
CTR is the ratio of users who click on a specific link to the number of total users who view a page, email, or advertisement. In other words, it measures how many users “clicked through” to view your content, receive a demo, book a call, or whatever else your CTA led to.
If you’re running a cost-per-click ad campaign, you should track the ratio of people who have seen the ad versus the number of people that took action by clicking.
In addition to understanding the success of a given social ad, a better CTR will improve your quality scores and lower your costs. The better your ad performance is, the lower the price it is to acquire a new lead.
4. Cost Per Lead (CPL)
Customers indicate interest in your ad by opting in instead of simply seeing and moving on. These are “qualified leads,” showing an existing interest, need or desire for what a business has to offer. CPL leads are more likely to convert — and even develop into repeat customers — than prospects from impression-based campaigns.
CPL lets marketing teams know if they’re spending an appropriate amount on different avenues of acquiring new leads, such as Facebook Ads. The higher your CPL is, the less effective the marketing campaign is.
BONUS: Traffic Sources
Our bonus metric is your website traffic sources. It’s great if your company receives tons of traffic during a campaign, but if you don’t know where the traffic came from, you will struggle to create better ads in the future. You’ll also want to know which ads performed well and why, so you can replicate those strategies.
Knowing how your social ad contributes to your overall traffic to your website is essential. Spikes in activity can show you how engaging your campaign was, how many unique/new visits you had, and your conversion ratios. To better understand what your traffic means, you should look at it in the context of conversions, traffic sources, and leads.
Key Takeaways
Your social media ad performance is more than good design and good copy; it’s many factors such as using the right platform, offering the right service or product, and more. But understanding these five key ad performance metrics can help you better understand how to create more effective ad campaigns and ads in the future.
If you need help creating scroll-stopping ads and don’t know how to put your idea on paper, Unli by Zoek wants to help! We offer graphic design subscription services to help small business owners like you on an as-need basis, offering unlimited requests, revisions, and possibilities.
Click the button below to speak to a professional about how Unli by Zoek can take your social media ads to the next level.