Benchmarks—it’s how we measure the performance of an ad on social media channels and lets us know if our ads are performing good, bad, or ugly. While some vendors have implemented tools like the Forecasted Results Window on LinkedIn to help clients “predict” the performance of social advertising campaigns, many agencies are turning to their historical data to help answer questions like, “How many clicks, impressions, applications, or hires can I expect to get from this social advertising campaign?”
With so many options available when building out a social media campaign, predicting a standard benchmark for every possible outcome is difficult. Differences in KPIs, goals, objectives, and candidate experiences can change the dynamics of each campaign and make it difficult to predict ROI. Therefore, each campaign is usually measured differently based on specific targeting, objectives, and ad types that influence cost and performance. Social channels don’t generally provide performance or ROI predictions outside of potential reach forecasts (by the end of the blog, you’ll know why!).
The following factors (and some that are not listed) affect ROI, performance, and conversions on social channels and make predicting benchmarks difficult:
Factors such as location, job title, industry, interest, skill set, and seniority may affect how large (or small) the audience size could be, which in turn affects the performance of ads. For example, registered nurses in two metro areas, such as New York and Denver, would have different audience sizes, which could result in distinctly different impressions, clicks, and average click-through rates (CTR). Each campaign will perform on a different level because location targeting factors in audience size.
There are usually two options when choosing a budget on social media: daily and lifetime budgets. With two different bidding types, you can choose to place a maximum cost-per-click (CPC) bid or allow the channel to automate the bidding strategy and adjust for the most clicks, impressions, or conversions. For example, let’s say you have two identical campaigns with the same targeting, creative, and objective. If you give these campaigns different lifetime budget amounts over the same duration of time, the number of impressions, clicks, and CTR will be varied. The campaign with the larger budget would allow for higher results and a greater chance to attract more candidates.
Your social ads’ objective will depend on the campaign goals or KPIs. Having a full understanding of what the ads are meant to accomplish before building out the campaigns is essential.
A few objectives currently available on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter platforms include:
Each of these objectives causes the ad to perform differently for each targeted audience. Choosing the wrong objective for an intended KPI or goal can greatly affect the outcome of any social advertising campaign.
The option to place an ad on a desktop, tablet, or mobile device is standard for most social ads. If most of your targeted audience is seeing the ads on their mobile devices, and your landing page, or the application process is not mobile optimized, than you may see fewer conversions and a large drop off when visitors land on your site. You can also place your ads on third-party sites within the audience networks for most social media channels.
Conversions help determine if we have met the goals or KPIs originally established while creating the social ad campaign. We can see conversions through a third-party source, like Google Analytics, or directly on the social platforms if the event pixels were set up properly.
These can come in a variety of statistics such as:
The most common conversions we see for recruitment advertising are ‘Apply Now’ clicks and ‘Completed Applications’. These types of conversions typically happen after the ad has done its job and has brought a candidate to the website. What happens next, and if the candidate completes an application, will depend on the landing page. Is it mobile optimized? Does it load properly and quickly? How long is the application process? All these items factor into a candidate’s experience and makes it difficult to predict the outcome based on a social advertising strategy.
The best approach if you are thinking of starting a social advertising campaign is to first create a relationship with your agency and start tracking performance. As you run more campaigns, your agency will give you more insights on what to expect based on historical data. More and more companies are looking at their data to find benchmarks and gage the performance of social advertising campaigns.
We also searched the web to find these general paid social industry standards for average CTR:
Sources: Word Stream, LinkedIn Ads Benchmarks, Adstage TW, Adstage IG, Rivaliq Benchmarks, Instapage
With historical data, advertisers can ascertain a broad range for average CTR, CPC, impressions, clicks, and engagement, but each industry, job, or client will have their unique benchmarks. Some standards may work for one client or industry, but not another.
While channels, like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, share potential reach when planning out a targeted audience, that is the only forecasted information they share at this time. Facebook stated, “company policy prevents us from sharing benchmarks, but rest assured, none of our competitors can provide benchmarks directly from the source either!”
Recruitics has developed internal KPIs per vertical over the past few years and has used this data to guide our ongoing social media campaigns for our clients. If you are a client and haven’t seen this data, please contact your account executive. If you are not a client and would like to learn more about Recruitics internal benchmarks, contact us today.
Have any questions? We’re happy to discuss more! Contact your account executive to set up a meeting or reach out via email.
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