People who use social media are usually overwhelmed with all of the content on their feed, so it’s no surprise that the ads that pop up need to make quite a big impression to stand out from the crowd. Such a notion is very much easier said than done, however, making what goes into an ad quite an art. On social media, ads are for the most part required to be highly engaging, beautifully-designed, and with a certain quality that stops users scrolling altogether. All of this is much easier said than done, however – in this article, we take a look at a few simple ways that you can get on track for making your social ads really stand out.
Tips to get you started
On social media, advertising is a tough game. Knowing what works and what doesn’t can certainly be an uphill battle a lot of the time, as what you implement can work one week and not the next. How do you then find out what went wrong? The short answer is, of course, metrics. Metrics are by far the best way you can gauge what is right or wrong about your ad on social media, and luckily for businesses, social media services provide a variety of metrics you can use to monitor the success of your advertising. There are three commonly-monitored metrics that are particularly valuable to measure success: Click-Through Rate (CTR), Cost Per Conversion (CPC) and Conversion Rate. When you’re considering Click-Through Rate, this result refers to the number of clicks your ad has divided by the number of impressions it received (represented as clicks/impressions). In essence, this metric indicates the relevance of your content in relation to your audience and the overall quality of that incoming traffic.
More metrics to help you manage ads
When you refer to Cost Per Conversion with your social media metrics, this will translate to your intended core conversion goal (whether it be signups, app install, downloads, visits to posts). In order to properly calculate the Cost Per Conversion, all you need to do is divide the amount of money you have spent by the number of conversions that occurred. This number will then give you a good idea about whether your ads are worth the money you’re investing, and from here you can adjust your spend accordingly. Finally, the conversion rate will indicate the number of visits to your relevant website result from your social media ads that converted. This number will give you some indication of the quality of the clicks your ad is receiving as well as how well your actual landing page is doing. To get an even clearer understanding of the metric in relation to conversion rate, you might even want to consider benchmarking traffic from your social advertising against conversion rates from other sources.
Putting what you learn into practice
When you’re constructing all of the elements that make up your ad on social media – think written content images, videos, fonts, colours, brand representation and message – measuring what you think works against the metrics is often the only real way you can gauge what your audience really responds to. By understanding what they like and dislike, you can then work to create the perfect ad that can work to capture more people’s attention more of the time.
