Here are 7 KPIs to Measure Your Next Social Promotion

Social media promotions are a primary driver of your CPG branding efforts. These campaigns can help you reach new consumers and keep the interest of your existing ones. But how can you measure the success of these campaigns? What CPG KPIs are relevant and how can these performance benchmarks help you conduct better promotions in the future?

Social Media CPG KPIs

Key performance indicators (KPIs) on social media require constant monitoring and tweaking to ensure the success of your CPG branding promotions. Measuring will help you continually improve your strategy to gain the maximum ROI from any campaign. But social media channels are very different; what works on Facebook may not work on Instagram. 

One huge benefit of these social media platforms is their immediacy; if you’re tracking CPG KPIs in these channels closely, you can shift your approach in real-time to maximize your return. But to even recognize your success in these efforts, you must measure the expense versus the margin of the campaign. But that’s a high-level benchmark. It’s the micro-management and tweaking of the spikes within the campaign that will help blow your goals out of the water in less time. Generally, we’re talking about measuring:

• The frequency of shopping patterns by consumer demographics (and the individual consumer)
• The consistency of purchasing specific CPG products
• The number of items in the cart per e-commerce trip
• The breadth of CPG categories shopped
• The consumer level of participation in the promotional event

All of these are CPG KPIs that must be measured by the promotional event. But this is still looking at the big picture. Here are seven specific CPG KPIs for almost any social pipeline:

1. The number of participants in your campaign. Compare this to previous campaigns and other channels. Does one channel outperform another for your target demographic?
2. How many new fans you gained for the promotion by day and by the life of the campaign. Watch the new fan count and compare it to your prior efforts by channel. Seasonality and competitor activity will affect this, of course. 
3. What is your reach by promotion? The more user interaction, the better, but make sure this number includes click-thru rates or a CPG KPI showing activity with your CTA. (See #5.)
4. How many shares or likes you are receiving per campaign and channel. This will quantify the popularity of your message within that channel and for your target audience.
5. Your total number of click-thrus. Most marketing teams use URL shorteners; make sure you track the number of click-thrus as a social metric. 
6. What kind of comments did your post generate? This includes both positive and negative feedback. Interestingly, it’s the negative comments that will help you better hone your next promotion.
7. What was the spend versus the return? Overall ROI is still the ultimate CPG KPI for any promotion. What was the true conversion rate that actually generated leads or made sales?

You can also manage your CPG branding promotion down to the micro-level, by managing the specific return by:

• Brand
• Social platform
• The objective in using that channel and what the ROI would look like
• Number of impressions versus click-thrus or other CPG KPIs
• The cost and return

CPG branding campaigns can help organizations improve their overall awareness and sales of a product. But this requires extensive tracking of clear cut CPG KPIs to get a better rate of return.

Hangar12 is at the forefront of CPG marketing strategy and more. Subscribe to our blog to stay up-to-date with our latest insights.