Social ad campaign ROI: How to solve the second biggest marketing challenge
Written by Natalia Selby
What’s the biggest challenge you’ve faced this year in your marketing role? According to recent research by HubSpot, generating traffic and leads is the number one challenge marketers battle with every day.
So far, so… well, obvious!
But closely following that is the challenge of proving ROI for marketing activities. It’s something that crops up time and again in our discussions with Mediahawk clients. In fact, HubSpot’s research showed that nearly half of the marketers surveyed said they were only ‘somewhat confident’ about making campaign budget decisions to increase ROI.
Proving the ROI of social ad campaigns
In our own conversations with Mediahawk clients, we know that social media advertising continues to be a challenge when it comes to proving ROI.
Tracking the return on your ad spend isn’t so bad when everything stays in the digital realm. Imagine a basic customer journey where a prospect sees your social ad on Facebook, clicks a link to your website, then goes on to make a purchase on your website. A journey like this is easy to report on with today’s digital marketing and analytics tools at your fingertips.
But consider a second scenario. The person sees your Facebook ad, clicks through to your website, but then picks up the phone and calls you to make a purchase instead. How would you ever know the Facebook ad contributed to the sale? How do you track that customer journey, when it suddenly veers from the online world to the offline world?
Director of marketing at Beautiful.ai, Kim Giroux, put it best when she said that proving marketing ROI shouldn’t mean “extra work or effort”. The technology exists today to make marketers lives easier on every level – and to help the 48% of ‘somewhat confident’ marketers be 100% confident in their budgeting decisions.
Revealing the hidden ROI of social campaigns
At Mediahawk, we know there’s a lot we can do to help marketers solve the social ad ROI conundrum. It’s what our call tracking and marketing attribution software is designed to do, after all!
When you connect Mediahawk to Facebook using our built-in integration, you can see which phone calls and web visitors came from your ad campaigns.
What does this mean for marketers?
If you’re struggling to nail down an accurate ROI for your social ad campaigns, our Facebook integration could be your new best friend. It will enable you to do a whole host of great things:
- See the phone calls that came in as a result of social ad campaigns. But it’s not just all about the phone. You can see how your ads influence the performance of other calls to action, too – such as live chat or opt-ins to marketing emails.
- If you’re a marketing agency or a social media manager, you’ll be able to demonstrate to clients that your effort (and their investment) is paying off. You may even find that your campaigns are performing at a higher ROI than you realise.
- You’ll know how many calls, or other calls to action, have occurred as a result of your campaigns. You’ll see the cost per call, and also the value of each call (if you link your call tracking data with your CRM).
Every day, your customers (or your clients’ customers) see ads on social media, visit your website, but pick up the phone to make an enquiry – rather than continuing their customer journey online. At that point, they become invisible to you, and your attribution models just can’t keep up.
But don’t despair! Our integration for Facebook will help make those leads visible to you again, and solve the challenge of recording accurate social ad campaign ROI once and for all.
Learn more about our Facebook integration and see how marketers use it every day to uncover hidden leads and sales.