What is a Metric Anyway?

Creative Marketing Arts recently lost a long-time client. I was saddened because many of my clients have become good friends, and when we part ways, it can feel like a relationship break-up. I try never to take it personally, but I still feel the pain and think OUCH, that sucks. 

This client surprised me because he stopped using our agency to save marketing dollars and show a better profit at the end of the year. During the separation transfer, I asked him who we should shift their digital media platforms to. He caught me off-guard when he directed me to the company’s receptionist’s email. I was startled that he saw the services we provide as something that his receptionist should oversee. I thought, wow, he really doesn’t understand all the procedures, time, investments that must be considered when posting each and every item to their feeds. A few months following our “break-up,” I looked to see how their platforms were performing; it was discouraging to see the entire program was a mess. Stores were tagged at the wrong locations. There was little-to-no engagement and no sharing or commenting. And I found multiple typos. Any one of those issues would have been terms for immediate dismissal for my staff. I want to be clear this wasn’t the receptionist’s fault. Managing social media isn’t what a receptionist is trained for. I felt terrible about it because that client had invested thousands of dollars into those platforms over the years. The reputation of the property went downhill online within 6 months. All credibility was gone.

“The reputation of the property went downhill online within 6 months.”

Their downhill spiral got me thinking and I realized that many of our clients probably don’t know or understand what goes on behind the scenes of their digital platforms. Don’t know that, internally, we go through 3 rounds of proofing for every single post for every client. Don’t think about the hours of commenting we do with each customer. Don’t understand how we look at the metrics constantly to make sure we are achieving the client’s goals.

From this epiphany, I decided to write a series of blogs to help my clients (and myself) feel better about hiring CMA and what excruciating attention to detail we go through each day when we plan out the digital media calendar for each client. 

This blog is about the basics that every customer should know. I am putting this into the simplest terms as we start to learn together how to build a reputation and increase revenue through digital media.

What are Metrics?

Metrics are a way to measure your company’s digital media success; they provide a glimpse into your platform’s performance, target market, and how you are being perceived by your followers. They offer a way to gauge the impact of digital media activity, who is listening and how you are reaching them. Each post targets a different objective for shopping centers, so each time we draft a post we must recalculate the demos and target market, ensuring we address direct, specific needs of the audience.

Here is a Quick Overview of Media Math:

Impressions:
The number of times your content is shown, no matter if it is clicked or not.

Reach:
The number of unique users who see your content multiple times.

Audience Growth Rate:
This is a measure of how many new followers you are gaining and maintaining. Your growth rate per month can vary depending on the size of your existing audience. This can change from 1% for accounts with a large following, to around 15% for smaller audiences, quarterly. 0.5% monthly being a good average of growth. You must keep your target audience engaged because you don’t want them to unsubscribe from your channels.

Engagement Rate:

Engagement rate is based on your audience size divided by the number of engagements per post. It creates a measure of how many people are interacting with your feed’s content. If you have comments, shares, and saves you are growing your feed in the best way possible.

Bounce Back Rate:

The number of visitors who don’t engage with offers and don’t click through your digital media.

This is the percentage of users who click “back” when initially engaging with the page/content/post. This metric mostly refers to your website over social – but a small percentage of the tracking for social is geared towards your platform’s “stories” and when people “skip” them.

This is only the beginning. We will get into the algorithms next month–an entirely different ball of wax.