A Beginner's Guide: Technical Setup for Measuring Your Social Media Advertising
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To track and see how your social media campaign is doing, you need a technical setup. This lets you gather valuable data to optimize your campaign and get great results. In this post, we will cover a few essential basics you shouldn't forget in your technical setup.
Before you start, look at your current starting position. Review your website to see what is possible to do with your current setup. You also need to set a goal for your campaign to know what data actually matters. Is your goal to build brand awareness or drive conversions? Here are a few tips on what to include in your technical setup to measure your social media results:Install your pixelTo get started, install a pixel in the channels you plan to use. A pixel tracks how effective your ads are by measuring actions users take on your website. Here are some setup resources:
Install Snap Pixel
Create and install a Facebook pixel
Install the Pinterest tag
Install TikTok Pixel
Create a Twitter website tag
With your pixel, you can:
Reach the right audience
Make sure your ads reach the right people who are likely to take action. You can also find new customers who visited your site using this data.
Increase conversions
Set up automatic bidding to target people who are most likely to convert on your website.
Measure ad performance
Get a clear picture of how your ads are doing by tracking how people see and interact with them.
Google Tag Manager
Your pixels are installed as tags in Google Tag Manager. GTM is a free, handy tool to manage all your website and mobile app tags in one place. You use it to track how users move around your site and what they click on. This data helps you optimize your site for better results, like more sales or sign-ups. You can use this same setup across all social channels, making it easy to compare data. *New iOS updates from 2021 mean your business needs to own its data, ad account, and pixels. You can read more about this here.
Google Analytics
GTM connects easily with Google Analytics, where you can collect and analyze all your data to understand and optimize your campaigns.
Here is the key data you can track, depending on your goal:
Page views
Shows that a user has interacted with your brand online. This is perfect for building retargeting audiences and mapping out the customer journey.
Interactions per visit
This is broken down into easily measurable actions:
Specific views on key product pages, how far users scroll down, and how long they stay on your site. In B2B, you mostly want to track specific page views so you can segment your audience based on how they interact with your landing page.
Conversions (B2C)
For B2C, this is all about tracking purchases. To help customers complete their purchase, use clear call-to-actions from your ad to the landing page. Make sure your conversion pixel is valued correctly, and keep currency in mind if you sell in multiple markets. You can set pixel values manually or dynamically.
Conversions (B2B)
In B2B, the focus is less on direct purchases and more on generating leads. You win a lead when a user downloads a report and shares their name, email, or phone number. LinkedIn lead gen forms are also great tools for this.
View content
Track exactly what content users view and use that data to retarget them later. This lets you set up specific rules on your landing page.Store visits
Have a physical store? You can connect your offline store data to your ads—for example, by tracking if members of your customer club buy an advertised product in-store.
UTM tags
Add these to your ad links to easily track which campaigns drive website traffic. This helps you compare social media ads against other marketing efforts.Test your setupBefore going live, use GTM's preview mode to test everything. You can also use pixel helper extensions for Google Chrome to make sure your events are working.
Summary
GTM makes it simple to collect data and keep track of your pixels in one place. There is so much you can do with a good technical setup, but the most important thing is to focus on your campaign goals and keep it simple—focus on what drives your business forward.Good luck! Test, learn, and optimize to get the best results. And don't forget to subscribe to our newsletter for more tips!
