Facebook has certainly made it very easy and convenient to promote your posts. All you do is you quickly click on 'Boost' button, pick how many people you want to reach and Facebook does the rest. What does it do exactly? Who knows! All you get is seemingly random but very impressive results - many thousands of people reached in a matter of minutes some times.
Demystifying such results is what we do here at Social Report.
We have come up with series of reports in a general category "Paid vs. Organic". Here is what are after:
- For key metrics such as impressions and reach we added several metrics around the dashboard how many of these are organic and how many are paid. The goal of these reports s to show you the 'organic' trend. Percentage of each metric that was organic - that did not require your to pay for it. It may be quite low at first (in single digits event) but you will need to see an upward trend over time. This is how you know that you are able to turn paid traffic into persistent organic one. The goal is to have more organic activity - not only is it free but also it creates a very different environment on your pages.
- The next goal is to understand the engagement patterns - how many of actionable events - such as clicks, conversions, comments are occurring as a result of paid posts vs. organic. An interesting observation here is that it will be just the opposite of #1. Just like you organic impressions are just a small fraction of the paid once, here you will find that when it comes to actionable events - you will be getting much more engagement from your organic posts then from your paid once. Here you will be looking for an upward trend on your paid engagement - this is how you know that you are getting your money's worth. If your are not getting engagement from paid traffic - there is little reason to pay for ads.
- Web stats are also a great indicator - consider your bounce rate in relation to 'Paid vs. Organic' traffic. Bounce rate is an inverse of 'social engagement'. You want to see bounce rate low - this means that people are getting past your home page. At first you will also find that bounce rate is quite high for paid traffic. Your goal is to increase it and our reports will allow you to keep an eye on its growth.
We are still working on figuring out the actual mechanisms of running promoted posts on both Twitter and Facebook. Hopefully we can shed some light onto that as well at some point.