A Beginner's Guide: Technical Setup for Measuring Your Social Media Advertising

To measure and see how your campaign is performing on social media, you need a technical setup to extract valuable data that you can use to optimize your campaign and achieve successful results. In this blog post, we will cover some key fundamentals that you shouldn’t forget in your technical implementation.

Before you start setting up your platforms technically, review your starting position. Go through your website to ensure what can be done based on its current state. You also need to set a goal for your campaign to determine what data is actually valuable to measure. Is the goal to increase brand awareness or drive conversions? Below are some tips on what you need to include in your technical implementation to measure your results on social media. Install your pixel To get started, you need to install a pixel in the channels you choose to use for your campaign. A pixel is used to analyze how effective your ads are by measuring every event users make on your website. Here are some resources for pixel setup:

Install Snap Pixel
Create and install a Facebook pixel
Install Pinterest Tag
Install TikTok Pixel
Create a Twitter website tag

With your pixel, you can ensure the following:

Your ads reach the right audience

You can ensure you reach the right audience and that they take the action you aim for. You can also prospect new customers who have visited your website through the information you obtain from this event.

Increase conversions
You can set up automatic bidding to target people who are likely to convert on your site.

Measure your ad results
You can gain a better understanding of your ads by measuring what happens when your audience sees and interacts with them.

Google Tag Manager
Your pixels are installed as tags in Google Tag Manager. GTM is a third-party tool and is free to use to manage your tags linked to your website and other mobile apps. You use the tool to collect data from users and track how they move on your site or what they choose to interact with in turn. These results help you optimize your website to achieve better results, for example, in terms of conversions. The same technical setup can be implemented in all social channels, and it's important that they are the same to compare the data later. *New IOS updates have occurred in 2021, which include that your business will own your data, ad account, and pixels. You can read more about it here .

Google Analytics
GTM can connect to Google Analytics, where you can gather all the data and information you receive. This is the statistics you can analyze to begin understanding your campaigns and then optimize them.

You can measure this data depending on your campaign goal:

Pageviews
Measures that the user has engaged with the brand digitally. This event is measured to create retargeting audiences and to exclude and become the most important division in the customer journey. But also to secure the cold audiences.

Interactions per visit

This event is divided, and you can measure this:

Specific page views of key pages related to the product you focus on for your ads. How far down the user scrolls on your website. The time the user spends on your website. In the B2B segment, only specific page views are necessary to measure, depending on the data you receive, so you can segment the audience based on how they have interacted on the landing page.

Conversions Business-to-consumer (B2C)
This event in B2C is valuable to measure to see purchases or transactions made during the campaign. For your customers in the B2C segment to reach the final stage and the main goal, it’s important to have clear calls to action for the user to proceed from your ad to the landing page and navigate there. Be sure to evaluate your conversion pixel, and if you have a multimarket, consider the currency. You choose where to use the value of your pixels manually or dynamically all the way.

Business-to-business (B2B)
In B2B, the main focus is not on measuring conversions involving purchases or transactions, it's lead generation that’s important. You can obtain a lead by the user downloading a report and then filling in their details such as name, email address, or phone number, which your sales department can then act on. Through LinkedIn, you can get support via their lead-gen forms.

View content
You can measure which content the user has interacted with and viewed and then use that information to re-advertise to that audience. This allows you to set an interval value on your landing page. Store visits
Do you have a physical store? Then you can use data from your physical store, for example, if you display an ad to an audience that you can later see has made a purchase through the customer club that bought the product you advertised.

UTM tags.
With these, you can link the links you have to your ads, aiming for campaigns to be able to analyze the traffic your campaign drives and see your advertising compared with other channels and activities. Secure your technical installation When you are in the final stage of your technical setup, you can take advantage of the preview mode in GTM and test your setup before sending it out. You can also use pixel extensions for Google Chrome and see which events you have implemented.

Summary

GTM simplifies your process of retrieving data and can keep track of your pixels from different channels. There is a lot that the valuable data from your technical setup can be used for. But the important thing is to always go back to see if you are reaching your goals for the campaign and try to keep it simple since there is an amazing amount you can do – stay close to the business. Good luck, and as we like to say: Test, learn, and above all, develop to achieve the best results. Don’t forget to keep updated by subscribing to our newsletter!