SMM-performance indicators: how to understand that your money is not going down the drain?

7 SMM campaign metrics – how to understand that your money is not going down the drain?

The low cost of the lead is a desirable indicator for the customer. Cheap lead causes a healthy rustic appetite and … makes you doubt. “I leaked the budget” is a logical result for Internet businessmen who are trying to do everything themselves or run into unscrupulous contractors. Check the effectiveness of SMM traffic using simple and accessible tools even for beginners. Also, do not forget about the three main errors in SMM

“Dead” subscribers

A favorite trick of beginners and experienced, but dishonest, SMM specialists. You think that the rapid flow of traffic was obtained by the skillful hands of a cool specialist. In fact, your SMM-schik went to drink beer, and a trouble-free bot is working instead: he adds fake friends, likes and even reposts to the community.

Through his efforts , a real mess is being created in your public – the tactics of winding up participants with bots has two disadvantages:

• It is useless for your business, because your subscribers are not warm-blooded people with money in their pockets, but fake pages.
• It is dangerous for your resource. Search engines evaluate the engagement and reach of subscribers. If there are only 10-20 active community members per 10,000, smart robots see this and lower the status of the resource on the network.

Thus, the cost of the lead in the inflated traffic is seductively low, but at the same time you are dealing with a group consisting of bots.

How to calculate bots

The number of your subscribers can be checked using special Internet tools:

• For Vkontakte — AntiDogs
• For Twitter — FakersUp
• For Instagram* — Instafollowers

Important! When you check the community with the help of third–party services, there is a risk of account blocking – the social network may mistakenly decide that you have been hacked.

That’s why we recommend removing bots from the group manually:

1. View and select suspicious pages from the list of participants.
2. Fake accounts have unusual images on the avatar, photos of show stars, or have nothing at all.
3. The fake page is almost empty or filled with advertising content.

Natural increase in the number of group members

Monitoring user activity is an important and objective indicator of the quality of the group. A gradual but constant influx of participants provides the most cherished indicators for business – the quality of the audience, its loyalty and the possibility of monetization.

Sharp jumps, as well as the mass flight of traffic, should alert you.

Important! Traffic spikes on the chart can mean days when contests, promotions, and advertising launches were held in the group. If there was no honest traffic stimulation, this is the work of a resourceful SMM–schik and his accomplice-bot.

Subscriber engagement

Track the reaction of the group members to the posts. Social networks offer such tools:

• number of views;
• likes;
• reposts;
• comments.

In addition, each social network has its own metric – it is a built-in functionality that analyzes the activity of participants on the group pages day and night.

For those who welcome an even more thorough approach, we recommend the LiveDune service. It is convenient because it shows results in dynamics. A full demo version for 2 weeks is available.

Coverage of posts

Facebook* and VKontakte offer businessmen a mega-useful views tool that determines the number of views of a post. In fact, views is an online counter that reacts sensitively to each viewing of a post. Moreover, both unique and repeat readers are added to the statistics.

The “coverage of posts” parameter allows you to evaluate the quality of content from the point of view of the target audience. Consider only new users.

Facebook* shows statistics on paid and regular coverage. Paid coverage is necessary to calculate the effectiveness of an advertising campaign.

In the Vkontakte social network, the SMM businessman has three tools at once:

• organic coverage – the number of readers of the post by subscribers;
• paid coverage – how many times have you read a post on transitions from advertising publications;
• viral – how many times the post has been shown to those who have not yet subscribed to your community.

The “viral reach” indicator allows you to evaluate the productivity of a “smart feed” that offers users who are not subscribed to your group to read your content. Such posts are published under the heading “it’s interesting”. In addition, virality shows the number of reposts.
The content effectiveness metric will help you find out what is really interesting to your subscribers and offer participants only viral topics and forms of content.

Subscriber Price

The indicator is critically important for communities whose users come through advertising channels. When evaluating the effectiveness of advertising, use such tools.

Click Through Rate (CTR)

The conversion rate (CTR) gives an objective assessment of creatives – teasers, titles, pictures. And also shows the relevance of the topic to the interests of the audience that the ad is configured for.

CTR = number of clicks/number of ad impressions

CPC (Cost per click)
CPC shows the cost of clicking on your advertising link.

CPC = advertising expenses/number of clicks to your group

Based on this formula, you can calculate the conversion to a subscription:

Subscription conversion = number of group memberships/number of click-throughs

Answers to questions

In Vkontakte and Facebook*, visitors can send questions to the community. The frequency and speed of responses are objective indicators of the effectiveness of your specialist. That is, you can determine for yourself, without long arguments and emotions, whether your SMM-schik is working out the fee.

Response Time shows the average response time, the parameter is specified in the dialogs. The indicator is calculated automatically based on activity over the last 3 days.

Response Rate = number of responses / number of questions.

Lead cost

The cost of the lead is what this whole carousel is all about. The main indicator of the effectiveness of SMM promotion. The cheaper the lead, the stronger the nuts of your SMM specialist.

Lead cost = budget spent on social networks / number of leads

Internet Analytics services

Use web analytics services to calculate leads.
Yandex. Metrica is a rather sophisticated service in terms of tools, while it is light and intuitive. Yandex. Metrica shows traffic received from social networks.
In addition, the built-in Session Replay function monitors and demonstrates the behavior of visitors on individual pages of the site.

UTM tags

Send leads from social networks to your site using special links that have UTM tags sewn into them. This technique allows you to evaluate the flow of visitors, even from each post, even from the group as a whole.
If you are advancing in Vkontakte, we recommend installing the application “Applications”. The tool facilitates the collection of statistics and reduces the visitor’s path to the application by one click. To install this useful gizmo, just go to “Community Management”, the “Applications” item.

Conclusion

All the listed SMM performance indicators are needed to assess the profitability of advertising, the quality of leads, the work of an SMM specialist, the volume of traffic from social networks. Apply them comprehensively.

Metrics for evaluating the quality of an SMM campaign:

1. Ruthlessly remove “dead” subscribers from the public.
2. Systematically improve the content in order to achieve uniform and continuous growth of participants.
3. Involve users in the life of the public. Use such SMM performance indicators as likes, comments, reposts.
4. View the statistics of views, as well as the viral coverage.
5. Monitor the speed and completeness of responses to messages from readers of the public.
6. Calculate how much a subscriber costs.
7. Estimate the cost of the lead!

And more…
Each business differs in its requests for traffic: somewhere, conversion to leads is desperately needed, somewhere – an active growth of feedback or subscription base.
To achieve an ideal result in all directions at once is too labor-intensive and often unprofitable. Focus your attention on the goals of your business and the tasks of the stages of the sales funnel!

*Instagram, Facebook are banned social networks in Russia